and suddenly she floated out before us, her heavy body spinning on her toes, light as a cloud and almost as swift; her eyes half closed, her hands at her breast, a Liberty cap on her head; and at the end of her turn she sank quietly into a heap in the middle of the floor.

Guilbert’s horrid dance began again, and the rapid flow of his explanation: “She is asleep, messieurs, this fay in the forest.” He paused ecstatically before her. “I have found her, I love her, I will have her, I shall win her by my dancing.” He touched her on the breast. She leaped to her feet and spun across the floor like a whirlwind, terror and amazement and grace and voluptuousness all portrayed in her movements. The ape leaped after her, dancing round and round her, enmeshing her like a firefly in a cage of grass. Her eyes grew wider with terror, she danced this way and that, trying to escape him; he seized her, and she flew to right and left, still fast in his clutches; she leaped straight up, and he caught her firmly in his arms and yelled, actually yelled, with delight.

And then—it seems utterly impossible even as I tell it—into the music came a wild, unholy burst of “The Watch on the Rhine.” The two figures on the floor leaped and curveted. A hoarse cheer rose to us from outside, and below the windows I saw three ecstatic German soldiers swaying and bellowing applause.... The ape held the forest-fay securely as they danced.... It must have been the music which first warned me of change, for into the German hymn stole a wilder motif—the great chords of an alien theme intruded, fought, conquered, and swept over the fragments of the old, and like a wild mob of music bursting from prisons of silence poured forth the “Marseillaise.” The dance was symbolic, then: Germany and Europe! The conquest of the world!... The knit figures still swayed and leaped, but the ape was weakening. The taller figure of the woman slowly dominated and then submerged the male. With a sudden thrust she flung him prone, but the music went on. There came a howl at our backs, and I saw the soldiers in the square below waving their rifles and dancing with anger.

McTeague stared as if he were just recovering from a trance, shook himself clumsily, and muttered through the “Marseillaise”: “Strange, isn’t it, how artistic these Belgians are? Now if you and I were arranging a dance——”

The loud howls of the Germans beneath us interrupted McTeague’s moralizings. Swift feet were upon the stair, the proprietor of the café and his wife burst in upon us, weeping, gesticulating, talking all at once. Guilbert lay quietly in the middle of the floor, still acting his part; the poet at the piano pounded lustily. Yvette, more practical than they, ran to a window at the back of the hall and looked out, then ran back to us and grasped us. “Come quickly,” she exclaimed. “We can escape before the Germans come.”

“But your husband, and Guilbert?” I asked.

“Drag them behind us, then,” she replied, shrugging her naked shoulders. “Come at once. The Germans are on the stair!”

Directly beneath our feet we heard a tumult of rough voices, a clatter of dishes and pans, and then tramping boots coming up the winding stair. Panic seized on McTeague and me simultaneously. We leaped at the performers and hustled them across the floor behind the twinkling feet of the dancing-girl. Before we reached the window she had already scrambled through it and dropped to a roof five or six feet below. We leaped after her and ran across a space sloping like a deck. Guilbert and the poet had not yet spoken a word. I had begun to laugh—a wild, hysterical laugh which irritated McTeague, so that while we ran he remonstrated with me: “Germans—’ll hear—come after us,” he panted. “What—’s matter—now?”

Yvette stopped abruptly before a whitewashed wall and gazed up at an open window three feet above the level of her head.

“Lift me up, messieurs,” she whispered, catching her breath.

“Why?” I demanded.

“Quick! We must escape this way.”

“Jamais de la vie!” I stuttered. “It’s right to escape, but I won’t be caught breaking and entering somebody’s house.”

“But quick!”

“No!”

“But I know this room,” she sobbed. “I have the right.”

“You have what?”

“The right to enter. Mon Dieu! C’est la chambre de mon ami, messieurs!”

Nothing is stranger than truth; nothing more grotesque, more dramatic, more truly unreal. I can imagine how this revelation would have been received on the stage in any of the five continents: the gestures of the outraged husband, the tableau of the horrified perceptor, and the amazement of the guests. But clinging to our precarious footing on the roof, we received it only as a stroke of luck—a means of escape from our awful predicament. We thanked Heaven for Yvette’s lover!

“Up with her!” I hissed at the poet. “Stoop down, man, and I’ll lift her into the room.”

He leaned obediently against the bricks. I grasped the dancer firmly by the sole of her soft dancing buskin and boosted her against the wall, the poet clumsily bent lower still, and she clambered over him to the window sill. Scraping, gasping, struggling, she reached it, slipped her arms over the sill, and rose. There was a flutter of stiff dancing skirt, her twinkling, white-clad legs and feet slipped over the ledge and out of sight. Then came a pause. McTeague and I stared at each other soberly. “Hm!” he breathed deeply. “Hm! Hm!”

Her head, with the Liberty Cap ridiculously awry, peeped over the window ledge. “It’s all right. He isn’t here. I’ll help you in, messieurs,” Yvette said calmly, and in two minutes more we stood beside her in the unlighted bedroom of her ami.

“Follow,” she said. “If you please. Here is my hand.”

In single file we tiptoed across the room and reached the door. I heard the knob turn softly; a rush of hot air streamed over our perspiring faces, we pattered out to a landing from which descended another flight of stairs, and stood breathlessly listening. The night seemed to pant with the heat, the dull heavy noises of life spoke behind closed doors, and far away I heard the tramp of a squad of soldiers off to relieve the guard.

“Come,” said Yvette softly. “It would not do for my friend to find us here, n’est-ce pas? One of you, messieurs, he might mistake for a rival!” I am afraid I laughed as she said this; for McTeague, who usually treated me with great respect, laid his hot moist hand on my mouth. “Hush!” he said. “You mustn’t laugh at her. You mustn’t approve. These people don’t look at these things as we do. They’re unmor——”