The autumn made me feel even more keenly the fate of Dauche, who in turn revealed to me still more cruelly the fate of all things. The idea that this man was going to die so tainted my thoughts that it destroyed all their stability, all their courage, all their efficacy. Indeed, the impotence of man was about the only thing that seemed certain to me as I contemplated the thin lines of the poplars, lighted up with their fugitive glory. And then it became almost impossible for me to look at anything without thinking at the same time, "He will never see it again."

There is a terrible page in SaintSimon about the death of Louis XIV. The historian cannot relate any of the actions of the dying monarch without repeating, with an obstinacy that is tinged with hatred, "And it was for the last time." In the same way I would think twenty times a day, as I watched my friend enjoying the beauties of the season, "So it is for the last time!" But there was nothing in my heart save a sorrowful pity.

After long hours on our hilltop we would be making up our minds to return, when, in the direction of the battle-field, the gleam of the first rockets would light up the twilight with their pale constellations.

Dauche seemed peaceful, light-hearted, and almost happy, like a man to whom hope returns every minute. He would make plans. That seemed unendurable to me, and I came so near to being irritated that I said to him once:

"You are very fortunate to be brave enough to make plans at such a time."

The words were very general, very vague; yet them seemed to me at once barbarous and spiteful. I was wondering how I could take them back when Dauche answered:

"Is n't it making a plan merely to let your heart beat? Besides, you must defy the future if you do not wish to be driven to fearing it."

These words, which were full of wisdom, troubled me without consoling me. I was assailed by a new anxiety: did Dauche have any idea of his real condition? The burden of my secret made me so acutely sensitive that for several days this question tormented me.

To-day, when I scrutinize my memories amid the broad and yet detailed perspective that time has given me, I am able to say positively that Dauche was indeed ignorant of the blow that menaced him. In truth, I never really surprised anything whatever that allowed me to suppose he felt the least disquietude about himself. I cannot recall any words, any reference, any faltering on his part, expressions which could not have failed to escape him if he had known the truth, and which would have revealed to me the extent of his knowledge.

On one other occasion, however, I was seized with doubt. A member of my regiment, mortally wounded during one of those many little engagements which have made Hill 108 the ever-bleeding wound of that sector, was brought in dying. We went to see him' on his death-bed, and I was eager to get Dauche away at once from this chamber, where he seemed to linger.

"Perhaps that man there is happier, after all," I said, to break a tense silence.

"Do you think so, do you think so?" the young man answered.

Some obscure force that was not chance made us look deep into each other's eyes, and in that clear gaze of my friend I saw a quiver, something furtive, terrified, like the sinking of a wrecked ship on a lonely ocean.

I made an effort to change the conversation, and I succeeded. With several deep breaths, Dauche seemed to turn back toward life, and before long he was laughing—a laughter in which I could not detect any false notes.

So, despite, this alarm, I could not help concluding that Dauche did not suspect anything. What I had seen in his eyes that day I might have surprised in any human glance. Besides, the flesh knows things of which the soul is ignorant, and this fleeting agony in the depths of his eyes was perhaps like one of those dumb cries of the brute in us which the consciousness allows to pass without either inspiring or recognizing them.

DAUCHE'S wound was completely healed. Mine needed very little care.

But I was not in the least interested in all this: I was waiting.

I realized this perfectly when Dauche asked me one day why I stayed so long in the army zone. I made up a reply in which I dwelt on our genuine friendship and the slightness of the ties that bound me to the interior. But when I examined my heart, I saw only too clearly the real reason for my long stay at S. I was waiting for something.

The affection I felt for Dauche had not ceased to grow despite all these vicissitudes. My pity for him had added to it, and the certainty that a near death awaited him had helped to exalt it not a little. With a natural leaning toward affection, I yielded myself unreservedly to a passion of devotion. I began to experience all the apprehensions of women who care for a sick child and who interpret with despair all the slightest signs, the least really alarming incidents.

There was a tennis-court in the park where a set of moldy ninepins had been set up. Dauche often used to bombard them with worn, old balls that were rotting away with the dampness. One morning, as he threw one of these balls, it crumbled in his fingers, upsetting his balance and making him stumble. He lifted his hand to his forehead, and I had the impression that he staggered. At once I was beside him and caught him in my arms.

"What in the world 's the matter with you?" he exclaimed as he saw my distorted face.

"I thought your head was hurting." "No, indeed," he replied, smiling. "I was readjusting my bandage."

Another time, when I let slip a book which I was absent-mindedly turning over, he stooped down, with his usual promptness, to pick it up. It struck me that he hesitated a moment before straightening himself, as if he were struggling with a sort of vertigo. I leaned over at once and took the book from his hands. His eyes were veiled in a faint, red mist. Perhaps that was merely an effect of my imagination, for it passed almost instantly.

"I forbid you," I said, painfully attempting to joke "I forbid you to abandon your rôle of convalescent."

He looked at me with an air of astonishment and answerd:

"You don't want me to think I 'm ill, do you?"

This answer made me realize how clumsy I had been, and I saw clearly that I must school myself to hide the anxiety I could not help feeling.

From that time on, it never ceased to torment me. I watched everything my friend ate or drank, not daring to give him advice and yet burning to speak my mind.

I hunted up and read secretly articles on medicine that were much more likely to confuse than to instruct me. I formed and rejected a thousand resolutions, made and unmade a thousand plans that would have been ridiculous or even comic if the fragrance of death had not impregnated and sanctified them all.

At night I would awake with a start and listen to the breathing of my companion, convinced, at the least pause, at the least change of rhythm, that he was going to die, that he was dead.

We had not given up our walks, but I had abruptly shortened them without advancing any reason. In like manner I had given up the game of checkers, offering as an excuse my own fatigue, which before long ceased to be a mere pretense. The time came when all these emotions had a bad effect upon my health. I was in bed for several days without being able to get any rest. I would have preferred absolute solitude, but the thought that Dauche might go off by himself and do something imprudent was intolerable to me. Yet I believed that no fatal accident could take place in my absence, inasmuch as I was waiting.

So he stayed by my side and read aloud to me to amuse me. I wished continually to stop him, and since I could say nothing of my anxiety in his behalf, I complained of my own head. Incredible though it seems, I appeared to be the man who had been prostrated, and he the man in full possession of his strength. As I have already said, I was suffering in his stead the bitterness of death.

One night during his first sleep he gave a curious animal moan, so strange

that I was instantly on my feet, and went and looked at him a long time by the glimmer of the night-light.

With the emotion which I experienced that evening there was mingled something like an intense desire for deliverance, and I discovered with horror that my sick soul was not merely awaiting the inevitable, but actually desiring it.

I was up again at the beginning of December, and our first walk was through the pine-woods that covers the sandy hilltops to the south of the highway from Rheims to Soissons.

We walked, slightly chilled, close together and silent, given over, no doubt, to those vague thoughts which cannot be put into words and which are of the very color and tissue of the soul.

A ridge of the hill sheltered and warmed us, and I suggested, when we reached the top, that we rest on the glossy stump of a beech, a bole that secreted a blood-like sap of an ocherous purple color.

I was tired, I was at the end of all desire, of all courage, indifferent to my actions, to my steps; in fact, exactly in the state of a man who has ceased to strive and gives up an agonizing struggle.

Is it really possible that such close unions can exist between two beings? Was it really I who abandoned the struggle that day?

Overcome with sadness, I had risen mechanically, and was watching, without seeing them, the hills thickly covered with trees, that fled away toward the horizon.

Was it actually an unusual sound that made me turn; was it not rather a shock, a rending of something within? Whatever it was, suddenly I knew that something was going on behind me. Then my heart began to beat madly, for it could be nothing but that terrifying and expected event.

And that it was.

Dauche had slipped down from the tree-trunk. I hardly recognized him. His whole body shook with a hideous, inhuman trembling, such as one sees in animals that have been struck down with the mallet at the slaughter-house. His hands and feet were twitching as if in a convulsive struggle,

This lasted an interminable time, during which I did not make a gesture. I let death have its way and waited until it had achieved its task. At last I slowly gathered the impression that it was stopping to breathe and loosing its victim.

Dauche's body was stiff, but inert. A feeble moaning came from his lips.

At the same moment I escaped from my trance, and despite the disorder of my mind, I set about carrying what had once been my friend away from that spot.

In order to raise him up, I made an effort that cost me great pain. He was drawn together and frightfully heavy. I had thrown my arms about his waist, and I carried him, breast to breast, as one carries a sleeping child.

Night was falling. I had to put my burden down after a few steps to rest. I do not know how I managed to get within sight of the château. As I reached the foot of the hill, at a turn of the avenue I suddenly came upon the doctor, who was taking a solitary walk. It was almost dark; I did not see the expression on his face, and I do not even remember what he said to me.

I laid the body on the ground, knelt beside it, my face streaming with sweat, and said:

"There he is." Then I began to weep.

There were cries, calls, lights. They carried away the body of Dauche and they carried me away also.

DAUCHE did not actually die until two days later. I did not wish to see him again. They had placed me in a distant room, where I remained in a semi-delirium, asking from hour to hour:

"Is it finished? Is it really finished?" As a matter of fact, I was aware of his end before they told me of it, and I let myself slip into a black, dreamless sleep, of which I have retained, however, the most distressing memory.

It seems that Dauche was buried in the little cemetery, shut in by limbs of birches and dead fir-trees, which one sees from the village of C- in a barren field of white sand. I could not make up my mind to go and visit him there. I bore within myself a tomb that was deeper and more actual.

T all started with Elsie, and with Elsie's friend who had been in Christiania and on the Dent Blanche. He pronounced them "she." He

got us both pronouncing them "she." Only Elsie took it up first and sprang it on me. Of course I had to adopt it. But I've looked it up since and have decided that it was a pure affectation. However, the man had done it before. That was evident. I never had.

Elsie is one of those girls who always got into any shinny game on the ice with the boys when she was twelve, and at that could sustain and return as many whacks as most of us. You could n't treat her exactly as you should treat a girl. She was too ferocious. When she was fifteen she could outskate most of the boys in Albany, and that is saying something, because everybody skates in Albany. A survival from Amsterdam, I suppose. If you 're young in Albany, and don't skate, why, you 're absolutely out of.it in the winter. Elsie used to toboggan out at Ridgefield, too. In fact, she became a regular snowbunting. I left the town when she was fifteen and I was twenty. I had n't seen her for ten years. Then I met her in New York in January, and she asked

me up to this place of theirs in the country for winter-sports. She also introduced me to Rodney Dean, this fellow who had done as the Christians in Christiania and as the dentists on the Dent Blanche. And that was where my trouble began.

Elsie had grown very attractive. She had lost a good deal of her snow-buntingness. She was "a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair," or words to that effect. She said they were all going to "she," and that I must also. At first I thought she was merely being ungrammatical.

Of course I wandered around and looked in at several places where they display the artistic creations of Messrs. Barney & Berry & Winslow, not to mention sweaters, scarfs, toques, tam-o'shanters, and mackinaws. They did n't understand me when I asked for what I wanted, and a woman in there, who was buying a skating-skirt, thought I was trying to flirt with her. They called them "skis," of course. Anybody would.

Ash was preferable, I learned. The ash ran up as high as $7.00. The patented bindings were $3.50. The boots were $9.50, the poles $1.25, and the book $1.50. I'm just telling you that because I want to say that it was n't