“One might suppose that she was protecting me!” he thought.  “She is the man and rejoices that I, the weak comrade, should be protected from danger. . . .  What a grotesque situation!” . . .

Fortunately, at times when Marguerite presented herself at the studio, she was again her old self, making him temporarily forget his annoyance.  She would arrive with the same joy in a vacation that the college student or the employee feels on a holiday.  Responsibility was teaching her to know the value of time.

“No classes to-day!” she would call out on entering; and tossing her hat on a divan, she would begin a dance-step, retreating with infantile coquetry from the arms of her lover.

But in a few minutes she would recover her customary gravity, the serious look that had become habitual with her since the outbreak of hostilities.  She spoke often of her mother, always sad, but striving to hide her grief and keeping herself up in the hope of a letter from her son; she spoke, too, of the war, commenting on the latest events with the rhetorical optimism of the official dispatches.  She could describe the first flag taken from the enemy as minutely as though it were a garment of unparalleled elegance.  From a window, she had seen the Minister of War.  She was very much affected when repeating the story of some fugitive Belgians recently arrived at the hospital.  They were the only patients that she had been able to assist until now.  Paris was not receiving the soldiers wounded in battle; by order of the Government, they were being sent from the front to the hospitals in the South.

She no longer evinced toward Julio the resistance of the first few days.  Her training as a nurse was giving her a certain passivity.  She seemed to be ignoring material attractions, stripping them of the spiritual importance which she had hitherto attributed to them.  She wanted to make Julio happy, although her mind was concentrated on other matters.

One afternoon, she felt the necessity of communicating certain news which had been filling her mind since the day before.  Springing up from the couch, she hunted for her handbag which contained a letter.  She wanted to read it again to tell its contents to somebody with that irresistible impulse which forestalls confession.

It was a letter which her brother had sent her from the Vosges.  In it he spoke of Laurier more than of himself.  They belonged to different batteries, but were in the same division and had taken part in the same combats.  The officer was filled with admiration for his former brother-in-law.  Who could have guessed that a future hero was hidden within that silent and tranquil engineer! . . .  But he was a genuine hero, just the same!  All the officials had agreed with Marguerite’s brother on seeing how calmly he fulfilled his duty, facing death with the same coolness as though he were in his factory near Paris.