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“Sir, I am terribly distressed about my brother, and am trying to get to him. I entreat you, furnish me with the means to reach Paris.” The light from a gas jet fell full on the captain’s face she stopped in surprise. “What, Otto, is it you! Oh, mon Dieu, be good to me, since chance has once more brought us together!”

It was Otto Gunther, the cousin, as stiff and ceremonious as ever, tight-buttoned in his Guard’s uniform, the picture of a narrow-minded martinet. At first he failed to recognize the little, thin, insignificant-looking woman, with the handsome light hair and the pale, gentle face; it was only by the brave, honest look that filled her eyes that he finally remembered her. His only answer was a slight shrug of the shoulders.

“You know I have a brother in the army,” Henriette eagerly went on. “He is in Paris; I fear he has allowed himself to become mixed up with this horrible conflict. O Otto, I beseech you, assist me to continue my journey.”

At last he condescended to speak. “But I can do nothing to help you; really I cannot. There have been no trains running since yesterday; I believe the rails have been torn up over by the ramparts somewhere. And I have neither a horse and carriage nor a man to guide you at my disposal.”

She looked him in the face with a low, stifled murmur of pain and sorrow to behold him thus obdurate. “Oh, you will do nothing to aid me. My God, to whom then can I turn!”

It was an unlikely story for one of those Prussians to tell, whose hosts were everywhere all-powerful, who had the city at their beck and call, could have requisitioned a hundred carriages and brought a thousand horses from their stables. And he denied her prayer with the haughty air of a victor who has made it a law to himself not to interfere with the concerns of the vanquished, lest thereby he might defile himself and tarnish the luster of his new-won laurels.

“At all events,” continued Henriette, “you know what is going on in the city; you won’t refuse to tell me that much.”

He gave a smile, so faint as scarce to be perceptible. “Paris is burning. Look! come this way, you can see more clearly.”

Leaving the station, he preceded her along the track for a hundred steps or so until they came to an iron foot-bridge that spanned the road. When they had climbed the narrow stairs and reached the floor of the structure, resting their elbows on the railing, they beheld the broad level plain outstretched before them, at the foot of the slope of the embankment.

“You see, Paris is burning.”

It was in the neighborhood of ten o’clock. The fierce red glare that lit the southern sky was ever mounting higher. The blood-red clouds had disappeared from where they had floated in the east; the zenith was like a great inverted bowl of inky blackness, across which ran the reflections of the distant flames. The horizon was one unbroken line of fire, but to the right they could distinguish spots where the conflagration was raging with greater fury, sending up great spires and pinnacles of flame, of the most vivid scarlet, to pierce the dense opacity above, amid billowing clouds of smoke. It was like the burning of some great forest, where the fire bridges intervening space, and leaps from tree to tree; one would have said the very earth must be calcined and reduced to ashes beneath the heat of Paris’ gigantic funeral pyre.

“Look,” said Otto, “that eminence that you see profiled in black against the red background is Montmartre. There on the left, at Belleville and la Villette, there has not been a house burned yet; it must be they are selecting the districts of the wealthy for their work; and it spreads, it spreads. Look! there is another conflagration breaking out; watch the flames there to the right, how they seethe and rise and fall; observe the shifting tints of the vapors that rise from the blazing furnace. And others, and others still; the heavens are on fire!”