chanced on the afternoon when the enemy's guns were reducing it
from an inhabited place into a rubbish heap. They could not well have
chosen a brisker hour for the promised visit. The shells were coming in
three and four to the minute. There was a sound of falling masonry. The
blur of red brick-dust in the air, and the fires from a half dozen
blazing houses, filled the eyes with hot prickles. The street was a mess
over which the motor veered and tossed like a careening boat in a heavy
seawash. In the other car, their leader, brave, perky little Dr.
McDonnell, sat with his blue eyes dreaming away at the ruin in front of
him. The man was a mystic and burrowed down into his sub-consciousness
when under fire. This made him calm, slow, and very absent-minded,
during the moments when he passed in under the guns.

They steamed up to the big yellow Hotel de Ville. This was the target of
the concentrated artillery fire, for here troops had been sheltering.
Here, too, in the cellar, was the dressing-station for the wounded. A
small, spent, but accurately directed obus, came in a parabola from over
behind the roofs, and floated by the ambulance and thudded against the
yellow brick of the stately hall.

"Ah, it's got whiskers on it," shouted Hilda in glee. "I didn't know
they got tired like that, and came so slow you could see them, did you,
Mr. Barkleigh?"

"No, no, of course not," he muttered, "they don't. What's that?"

The clear, cold tinkle of breaking and spilling glass had seized his
attention. The sound came out from the Hotel de Ville.

"The window had a pane," said Hilda.

"The town is doomed," said Barkleigh.

"Can't we get out of this?" he insisted. "This is no place to be."

"No place for a woman, is it?" laughed Hilda.

"Don't let me keep you," she added politely, "if you feel you must go."

"Listen," said the war-correspondent. About a stone's throw to their
left, a wall was crumpling up.

Dr. McDonnell had slowly crawled down from his perch on the ambulance.
His legs were stiff from the long ride, so he carefully shook them one
after the other, and spoke pleasantly to a dog that was wandering about
the Grand Place in a forlorn panic. Then he remembered why he had come
to the place. There were wounded downstairs in the Town-hall.

"Come on, boys," he said to Tom and Smith, "bring one stretcher, and
we'll clear the place out. Hilda, you stay by the cars. We shan't be but
a minute."

They disappeared in