"I wonder where the bomb hit last night. Père Tricot said near the Luxembourg."
What was her amazement to find the poor studio in ruins. No concierge to tell her a thing about it, for her lodge was locked tight and no one near. Judy picked her way sadly over the fallen front wall.
"I'll get my dress, anyhow." But although she was sure it had been on the divan in the studio, no dress was to be found.
"Well, I'll have to have something to wear besides this thin waist. I am cold now, and what will I do when winter, real winter comes? I shall have to send to Giverny for my trunk, and no telling what it will cost to get it here. Oh, oh, how am I to go on? I wish to God I had been sleeping on that balcony when the bomb struck. Then I would have been at peace."
Judy gave herself up to the despair that was in her heart. She made a thorough search for the suit through the poor wrecked apartment but no sign of it could she see. She went sadly back to the delicatessen shop and stepped behind the counter, her hat still on, to assist the good Mother Tricot, who was being besieged with customers.
"Take off your hat, child. Here is a fresh cap of Marie's and an apron. Did you get your dress?"
Judy told her kind friend of the bomb-wrecked studio and her lost suit.
"Oh, the vandals! The wretches! There must be a Prussian in our midst who would be so low as to steal your suit. No Frenchman would have done it. Before the war,--yes, but now there is not one who would do such a dastardly trick. We are all of one family now, high and low, rich and poor,--and we do not prey on one another."
"Well, it makes very little difference," said Judy resignedly. "I'll send for my trunk. I have other suits in it."
"Other suits! Oh, what riches!" but then the old woman considered that the friend of the Marquise d'Ochtè perhaps had many other suits.
Judy donned the cap and apron and went on with the shop keeping. No one could have told her from a poor little bereaved French girl. The cap was becoming, as was also the organdy collar. Her face was pale and her eyes full of unshed tears, but the sorrow had given to Judy's face something that her enemies might have said it had lacked: a softness and depth of feeling. Her friends knew that her heart was warm and true and that the feeling was there, but her life had been care free with no troubles except the scrapes that she had been as clever getting out of as she had been adroit getting in. She had many times considered herself miserable before but now she realized that all other troubles had been nothing--this was something she had had no conception of--this tightening of the heart strings, this hopeless feeling of the bottom having dropped out of the universe.