Page:The King in Yellow (1895).djvu/237

Rh women and children, and a great murmur, borne on the icy wind, swept through the Arc de Triomphe and down the dark avenue,—“Perdus! perdus!”

A ragged end of a battalion was pressing past, the spectre of annihilation. West groaned. Then a figure sprang from the shadowy ranks and called West’s name, and when he saw it was Trent he cried out. Trent seized him, white with terror.

“Sylvia?”

West stared speechless, but Colette moaned “Oh, Sylvia! Sylvia !—and they are shelling the Quarter!”

“Trent!” shouted Braith; but he was gone, and they could not overtake him.

The bombardment ceased as Trent crossed the Boulevard St. Germain, but the entrance to the rue de Seine was blocked by a heap of smoking bricks. Everywhere the shells had torn great holes in the pavement. The café was a wreck of splinters and glass, the bookstore tottered, ripped from roof to basement, and the little bakery, long since closed, bulged outward above a mass of slate and tin.

He climbed over the steaming bricks and hurried into the rue de Tournon. On the corner a fire blazed, lighting up his own street, and on the blank wall, beneath a shattered gas lamp, a child was writing with a bit of cinder,

The letters stared him in the face. The rat-killer finished and stepped back to view his work, but catching sight of Trent’s bayonet, screamed and fled, and as Trent