tabs had fallen on him from the sky.

His idyll with Eudoxie has continued here. We have had the proofs;
and once, indeed, he spoke of it. She is not very far away, and they
are very near to each other. Did I not see her the other evening,
passing along the wall of the parsonage, her hair but half quenched
by a mantilla, as she went obviously to a rendezvous? Did I not see
that she began to hurry and to lean forward, already smiling?
Although there is no more between them yet than promises and
assurances, she is his, and he is the man who will hold her in his
arms.

Then, too, he is going to leave us, called to the rear, to Brigade
H.Q., where they want a weakling who can work a typewriter. It is
official; it is in writing; he is saved. That gloomy future at which
we others dare not look is definite and bright for him.

He looks at an open window and the dark gap behind it of some room
or other over there, a shadowy room that bemuses him. His life is
twofold in hope; he is happy, for the imminent happiness that does
not yet exist is the only real happiness down here.

So a scanty spirit of envy grows around him. "One never knows,"
murmurs Paradis again, but with no more confidence than when before,
in the straitened scene of our life to-day, he uttered those
immeasurable words.