gs seen deep down
under clear water. They were mysterious as daytime ghosts; and already a
heartbreaking picturesqueness had taken possession of the streets, as an
artist-decorator comes into an ugly room and mellows all its crudeness
with his loving touch.

Gerbeviller's tragic little river Mortagne gleamed silver-bright beneath
a torn lace of delicate white flowers that was like a veil flung off by
a fugitive bride. It ran sparkling under the motionless wheel of a
burned mill, and twinkled on--the one living thing the Germans left--to
flow through the park of a ruined chateau.

When it was alive, that small chateau must have been gay and delightful
as a castle in a fairy tale, pink and friendly among its pleasant trees;
but even in its prime, rich with tapestries and splendid old paintings,
which were its treasures, never could the place have been so beautiful
as in death!

At a first glance--seen straight in front--the face of the house seems
to live still, rosy with colour, gazing with immense blue eyes through a
light green veil. But a second glance brings a shock to the heart. The
face is a mask held up to hide a skull; the blue of the eyes is the open
sky framed by glassless windows; the rosy colour is stained with dark
streaks of smoke and flame; the chateau among its trees, and the chapel
with its stopped clock and broken saints are skeletons.

Not even O'Farrell could talk. We were a silent procession in the midst
of silence until we came at last to the one quarter of the town whose
few houses had been spared to the courage of Gerbeviller's heroine,
Soeur Julie.

Her street (but for her it would not exist) has perhaps a dozen houses
intact, looking strangely _bourgeois_, almost out of place, so smugly
whole where all else has perished. Yet it was a comfort to see them, and
wonderful to see Soeur Julie.

We knocked at the door of the hospice, the cottage hospital which is
famous because of her, its head and heart; and she herself let us in,
for at that instant she had been in the act of starting out. I
recognized her at once from the photographs which were in every
illustrated paper at the time when, for her magnificent bravery and
presence of mind, she was named Chevaliere of the Legion of Honour.

But with her first smile I saw that the pictures had done her crude
injustice. They made of Soeur Julie an elderly woman in the dress of a
nun; somewhat stout, rather large of feature. But the figure which m