citizens, and yet it peopled her solitude.  The sick-room, whose door was kept shut to the outside world, looked out through its two windows upon this city.  Often, with her eyes fixed on its expanse, Helene had wept, leaning on the window-rail in order to hide her tears from her ailing child.  One day, too—­the very day when she had imagined her daughter to be at the point of death—­she had remained for a long time, overcome and choked with grief, watching the smoke which curled up from the Army Bakehouse.  Frequently, moreover, in hours of hopefulness she had here confided the gladsome feelings of her heart to the dim and distant suburbs.  There was not a single monument which did not recall to her some sensation of joy or sorrow.  Paris shared in her own existence; and never did she love it better than when the twilight came, and its day’s work over, it surrendered itself to an hour’s quietude, forgetfulness, and reverie, whilst waiting for the lighting of its gas.

“What a multitude of stars!” murmured Abbe Jouve.  “There are thousands of them gleaming.”

He had just taken a chair and sat down at her side.  On hearing him, she gazed upwards into the summer night.  The heaven was studded with golden lights.  On the very verge of the horizon a constellation was sparkling like a carbuncle, while a dust of almost invisible stars sprinkled the vault above as though with glittering sand.  Charles’s-Wain was slowly turning its shaft in the night.

“Look!” said Helene in her turn, “look at that tiny bluish star!  See —­far away up there.  I recognize it night after night.  But it dies and fades as the night rolls on.”

The Abbe’s presence no longer annoyed her.  With him by her side, she imagined the quiet was deepening around.  A few words passed between them after long intervals of silence.  Twice she questioned him on the names of the stars—­the sight of the heavens had always interested her —­but he was doubtful and pleaded ignorance.

“Do you see,” she asked, “that lovely star yonder whose lustre is so exquisitely clear?”

“On the left, eh?” he replied, “near another smaller, greenish one?  Ah! there are so many of them that my memory fails me.”

They again lapsed into silence, their eyes still turned upwards, dazzled, quivering slightly at the sight of that stupendous swarming of luminaries.  In the vast depths of the heavens, behind thousands of stars, thousands of others twinkled in ever-increasing multitudes, with the clear brilliancy of gems.  The Milky Way was already whitening, displaying its solar specks, so innumerable and so distant that in the vault of the firmament they form but a trailing scarf of light.

“It fills me with fear,” said Helene in a whisper; and that she might see it all no more she bent her head and glanced down on the gaping abyss in which Paris seemed to be engulfed.  In its depths not a light could yet be seen; night had rolled over it and plunged it into impenetrable darkness.  Its mighty, continuous rumble seemed to have sunk into a softer key.