of darkness, without the bugle-calls, and the city was plunged into
abysmal gloom, through which people who had been dining in
restaurants lost themselves in familiar streets and groped their way
with little shouts of laughter as they bumped into substantial shadows.

Paris enjoyed the adventure, the thrill of romance in the mystery of
darkness, the weird beauty of it. The Tuileries gardens, without a
single light except the faint gleams of star-dust, was an enchanted
place, with the white statues of the goddesses very vague and
tremulous in the shadow world above banks of invisible flowers which
drenched the still air with sweet perfumes. The narrow streets were
black tunnels into which Parisians plunged with an exquisite frisson of
romantic fear. High walls of darkness closed about them, and they
gazed up to the floor of heaven from enormous gulfs. A man on a
balcony au cinquième was smoking a cigarette, and as he drew the
light made a little beacon-flame, illumining his face before dying out
and leaving a blank wall of darkness. Men and women took hands
like little children playing a game of bogey-man. Lovers kissed each
other in this great hiding-place of Paris, where no prying eyes could
see. Women's laughter, whispers, swift scampers of feet, squeals of
dismay made the city murmurous. La Ville Lumière was extinguished
and became an unlighted sepulchre thronged with ghosts. But the
Zeppelins had not come, and in the morning Paris laughed at last
night's jest and said, "C'est idiot!"

But one night--a night in March--people who had stayed up late by
their firesides, talking of their sons at the front or dozing over the
Temps, heard a queer music in the streets below, like the horns of
elf-land blowing. It came closer and louder, with a strange sing-song
note in which there was something ominous.