bullet crashed through the window, burying itself in the opposite
wall.

After that things happened so quickly that it was impossible to say in
what order they occurred. There was suddenly a tremendous noise in the
flat.

"It was just as though the whole place was going to tumble about our
ears. All the pots and bottles began to jump about, and then another
bullet came through, landed on the dressing-table, and smashed
everything. The looking-glass crashed, and the hair-oil was all over the
place. I rushed out to see what was happening in the hall...."

What "was happening" was that the soldiers had broken the hall door in.
Lawrence saw then a horrible thing. One of the men rushed forward and
stuck Andre, who was standing, paralysed, by the drawing-room door, in
the stomach. The old man cried out "just like a shot rabbit," and stood
there "for what seemed ages," with the blood pouring out of his middle.

That finished Lawrence. He rushed forward, and they would certainly have
"stuck" him too if someone hadn't cried out, "Look out, he's an
Englishman--an _Anglichanin_--I know him."

After that, for a time, he was uncertain of anything. He struggled; he
was held. He heard noises around him--shouts or murmurs or sighs--that
didn't seem to him to be connected with anything human. He could not
have said where he was nor what he was doing. Then, quite suddenly,
everything cleared. He came to himself with a consciousness of that
utter weariness that he had felt before. He was able to visualise the
scene, to take it all in, but as a distant spectator. "It was like
nothing so much as watching a cinematograph," he told me. He could do
nothing; he was held by three soldiers, who apparently wished him to be
a witness of the whole affair. Andre's body lay there, huddled up in a
pool of drying blood, that glistened under the electric light. One of
his legs was bent crookedly under him, and Lawrence had a strange mad
impulse to thrust his way forward and put it straight.

It was then, with a horrible sickly feeling, exactly like a blow in the
stomach, that he realised that the Baroness was there. She was standing,
quite alone, at the entrance of the hall, looking at the soldiers, who
were about eight in number.

He heard her say, "What's happened? Who are you?..." and then in a
sharper, more urgent voice, "Where's my husband?"

Then she saw Andre.... She gave a sharp little cry, moved forward
towards him, and stopped.

"I d