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