her
lashes and peered through the diamond panes.

No one was to be seen. But between three and four in the morning the
first faint champing of marching feet could be heard and the Hun came
down from the bedroom looking as pale as death. He opened the door and
stood there listening. The insolent crunch, crunch, crunch of heavy
nail-studded service boots came nearer, and a khaki column appeared on
the winding road. The housewife, whose aching eyes had searched the road
for Boudru all day, saw them too.

"Look," she cried, "look! The English soldiers are coming. Do you see?"

_They were coming!_

The man from Stettin rushed up to the bedroom, and jumped into the oak
chest.

"Not tell the English! Not tell!"

Fifteen or twenty soldiers were to be heard grounding rifles and
throwing off their equipment in front of the house.

Entered here Sergeant Stansfield, and shouted gaily to the housewife,
but the moment he looked into her pale and worn face he understood that
some sorrow had befallen her. Before he could hold her she had slid
silently down on the floor, at his feet, and covered her face.
"Ah,--ah,--ah! O God, help and pity me! They have taken my little son,"
she cried.

At this moment a soldier rushed in at the door. "I think there is a man
who looks like a Boche trying to get out of the bedroom window!" he
said. "Will you come, Sergeant? Quick!"

The sergeant went quickly, and returned with some men with fixed
bayonets and led them up to the bedroom: He told them to break in. The
man was on his knees, with his horrible hands lifted up in supplication.
The soldiers kicked the man up and made him go downstairs into the front
room.

"See!" said a soldier, who held his bayonet ready, "there is blood on
his sleeve." The Hun cursed within his heart.

"It was none of my shedding," he whimpered.

"I had not said so," returned the sergeant quietly.

"We are here to find that out. Perhaps you know something about the lost
child?"

"I had no hand in it, God strike me dead!" the Hun answered fervently.

At that moment there was a sort of earthquake upstairs, a clash of
falling bricks and slates, a crashing pandemonium that sent everyone's
heart to his mouth. A shell had struck the roof. Then the ceiling above
bulged like a stuffed sack and burst in a cloud of pink-yellow dust.
Something dropped with a dead thud fair and square in the centre of the
fine oak refectory table. Sergeant Stansfield bent forward, lo