ffensive people! Have they resisted, do
you think?"

"That field hospital looked pretty busy," was the grim answer.

A little farther on, at a cross-road, there could no longer be any doubt
as to what had happened. The remains of a barricade littered the
ditches. Broken carts, ploughs, harrows, and hurdles lay in heaps. The
carcasses of scores of dead horses had been hastily thrust aside so as
to clear a passage. In a meadow, working by the light of lanterns, gangs
of soldiers and peasants were digging long pits, while row after row of
prone figures could be glimpsed when the light carried by those
directing the operations chanced to fall on them.

Dalroy knew, of course, that all the indications pointed to a
successful, if costly, German advance, which was the last thing he had
counted on in this remote countryside. If the tide of war was rolling
into Belgium it should, by his reckoning, have passed to the south-west,
engulfing the upper valley of the Meuse and the two Luxembourgs perhaps,
but leaving untouched the placid land on the frontier of Holland. For a
time he feared that Holland, too, was being attacked. Understanding
something of German pride, though far as yet from plumbing the depths of
German infamy, he imagined that the Teutonic host had burst all
barriers, and was bent on making the Rhine a German river from source to
sea.

Naturally he did not fail to realise that the lumbering wagon was taking
him into a country already securely held by the assailants. There were
no guards at the cross-roads, no indications of military precautions.
The hospital, the grave-diggers, the successive troops of cavalry, felt
themselves safe even in the semi-darkness, and this was the prerogative
of a conquering army. In the conditions, he did not regard his life as
worth much more than an hour's purchase, and he tortured his wits in
vain for some means of freeing the girl, who reposed such implicit
confidence in him, from the meshes of a net which he felt to be
tightening every minute. He simply dreaded the coming of daylight,
heralded already by tints of heliotrope and pink in the eastern sky.
Certain undulating contours were becoming suspiciously clear in that
part of the horizon. It might be only what Hafiz describes as the false
dawn; but, false or true, the new day was at hand. He was on the verge
of advising Irene to seek shelter in some remote hovel which their guide
could surely recommend when Fate took control o