"Do you know what I think Phil has done?" Susan was asking.
"Phil?" The name had startled me back to attention.
"I believe he's made himself one of them--the peasants, I mean--in some remote, dirty, half-starved Russian village."
"Why? That's an odd fancy, dear. And it isn't much like him. Phil's too clear-headed, or stiff-headed, for such mysticism."
"How little you really know him, then," she replied. "He's been steering since birth, I feel, toward some great final renunciation. I believe he's made it, now. You'll see, Ambo. Some day we'll hear of a new prophet, away there in the East--where all our living dreams come from! You'll see!"
"'In Vishnu-land what Avatar?'" I quoted, smiling sadly enough; and Susan's smile wistfully echoed mine, even while she raised a warning finger at me.
"Oh, you of little faith!" she said quite simply.
We had barely stepped out from the narrow doorway of the restaurant into a tenuous, moon-saturated mist, a low-lying diaphaneity that left the upper air-lanes openly clear, when the sirens were wailing again from every quarter of the city....
"They're coming early to-night!" I exclaimed. "Well, that ends all hope for a taxi home! We must find an _abri_."
"Nonsense! We'll walk quietly back along the river. Unless"--she teased me--"you really _are_ afraid, Ambo?"
I tucked her arm firmly into mine. "So you won't stumble, _Mlle. la Réformée_!"
"But it is a nuisance to be lame!" she protested: "I do envy you your two good legs, _M. le Capitaine_."
We made our way slowly along the embankment, passing the Pont des Arts, and two shadowy lovers paced on before us, blotted together, oblivious of the long, eerie rise and fall of the sirens; every twenty yards or so they stopped in their tracks, as by a common impulsion, and were momentarily lost to time in a passionate embrace.
Neither Susan nor I spoke of these lovers, who turned aside to pass under the black arches of the Institute, into the Rue de Seine....
As we neared the Pont du Carrousel the _barrage_ began, at first distant and muffled--the outer guns; then suddenly and grimly nearer. An incessant twinkle of tiny star-white points--the bursts of high-explosive shells--drifted toward us from the north. So light was the mist, it did not obscure them; it barely dimmed the moon.