“How long have you been at the Front, monsieur?”

“Two years, mademoiselle.  Time to go home and paint, is it not?  But art—!” he shrugged his heavy round shoulders, his whole bear-like body.  “A little mad,” he muttered once more.  “I will tell you a story.  Once in winter after I had rested a fortnight, I go back to the trenches at night, and I want some earth to fill up a hole in the ground where I was sleeping; when one has slept in a bed one becomes particular.  Well, I scratch it from my parapet, and I come to something funny.  I strike my briquet, and there is a Boche’s face all frozen and earthy and dead and greeny-white in the flame from my briquet.”

“Oh, no!”

“Oh! but yes, mademoiselle; true as I sit here.  Very useful in the parapet—­dead Boche.  Once a man like me.  But in the morning I could not stand him; we dug him out and buried him, and filled the hole up with other things.  But there I stood in the night, and my face as close to his as this”—­and he held his thick hand a foot before his face.  “We talked of our homes; he had a soul, that man.  ‘Il me disait des choses’, how he had suffered; and I, too, told him my sufferings.  Dear God, we know all; we shall never know more than we know out there, we others, for we are mad—­nothing to speak of, but just a little, little mad.  When you see us, mademoiselle, walking the streets, remember that.”  And he dropped his face on to his fists again.

A silence had fallen in the room-very queer and complete.  The little girl nursed her doll, the soldier gazed at the floor, the woman’s mouth moved stealthily, and in Noel the thought rushed continually to the verge of action:  ‘Couldn’t I get up and run downstairs?’ But she sat on, hypnotised by that silence, till Lavendie reappeared with a bottle and four glasses.

“To drink our health, and wish us luck, mademoiselle,” he said.

Noel raised the glass he had given her.  “I wish you all happiness.”

“And you, mademoiselle,” the two men murmured.

She drank a little, and rose.

“And now, mademoiselle,” said Lavendie, “if you must go, I will see you home.”

Noel took Madame Lavendie’s hand; it was cold, and returned no pressure; her eyes had the glazed look that she remembered.  The soldier had put his empty glass down on the floor, and was regarding it unconscious of her.  Noel turned quickly to the door; the last thing she saw was the little girl nursing her doll.

In the street the painter began at once in his rapid French: 

’I ought not to have asked you to come, mademoiselle; I did not know our friend Barra was there.  Besides, my wife is not fit to receive a lady; vous voyez qu’il y a de la manie dans cette pauvre tote.  I should not have asked you; but I was so miserable.”

“Oh!” murmured Noel, “I know.”