“She is a German,” volunteered the Russian.  “Our concierge has ferreted out her nationality.  He must have gone by this time to join his regiment.  Last night I could hardly sleep.  I heard the lamentations through the thin wall partition, the steady, desperate weeping of an abandoned child, and the voice of a man who was vainly trying to quiet her! . . .  Ah, what a rain of sorrows is now falling upon the world!”

That same evening, on leaving the house, he had met her by her door.  She appeared like another woman, with an old look as though in these agonizing hours she had been suffering for fifteen years.  In vain the kindly Tchernoff had tried to cheer her up, urging her to accept quietly her husband’s absence so as not to harm the little one who was coming.

“For the unhappy creature is going to be a mother,” he said sadly.  “She hides her condition with a certain modesty, but from my window, I have often seen her making the dainty layette.”

The woman had listened to him as though she did not understand.  Words were useless before her desperation.  She could only sob as though talking to herself, “I am a German. . . .  He has gone; he has to go away. . . .  Alone! . . .  Alone forever!” . . .

“She is thinking all the time of her nationality which is separating her from her husband; she is thinking of the concentration camp to which they will take her with her compatriots.  She is fearful of being abandoned in the enemy’s country obliged to defend itself against the attack of her own country. . . .  And all this when she is about to become a mother.  What miseries!  What agonies!”

The three reached the rue de la Pompe and on entering the house, Tchernoff began to take leave of his companions in order to climb the service stairs; but Desnoyers wished to prolong the conversation.  He dreaded being alone with his friend, still chagrined over the evening’s events.  The conversation with the Russian interested him, so they all went up in the elevator together.  Argensola suggested that this would be a good opportunity to uncork one of the many bottles which he was keeping in the kitchen.  Tchernoff could go home through the studio door that opened on the stairway.

The great window had its glass doors wide open; the transoms on the patio side were also open; a breeze kept the curtains swaying, moving, too, the old lanterns, moth-eaten flags and other adornments of the romantic studio.  They seated themselves around the table, near a window some distance from the light which was illuminating the other end of the big room.  They were in the shadow, with their backs to the interior court.  Opposite them were tiled roofs and an enormous rectangle of blue shadow, perforated by the sharp-pointed stars.  The city lights were coloring the shadowy space with a bloody reflection.

Tchernoff drank two glasses, testifying to the excellence of the liquid by smacking his lips.  The three were silent with the wondering and thoughtful silence which the grandeur of the night imposes.  Their eyes were glancing from star to star, grouping them in fanciful lines, forming them into triangles or squares of varying irregularity.  At times, the twinkling radiance of a heavenly body appeared to broaden the rays of light, almost hypnotizing them.