ments from the bricks and passed . . . ."

He put his hand to his mouth, and then moistened his lips.

"At the flash I had turned about . . .

"You know--she stood up--

"She stood up, you know, and moved a step towards me--as
though she wanted to reach me--

"And she had been shot through the heart."

He stopped and stared at me. I felt all that foolish
incapacity an Englishman feels on such occasions. I met his eyes
for a moment, and then stared out of the window. For a long space
we kept silence. When at last I looked at him he was sitting back
in his corner, his arms folded, and his teeth gnawing at his
knuckles.

He bit his nail suddenly, and stared at it.

"I carried her," he said, "towards the temples, in my arms--as
though it mattered. I don't know why. They seemed a sort of
sanctuary, you know, they had lasted so long, I suppose.

"She must have died almost instantly. Only--I talked to her
all the way."

Silence again.

"I have seen those temples," I said abruptly, and indeed he
had brought those still, sunlit arcades of worn sandstone very
vividly before me.

"It was the brown one, the big brown one. I sat down on a
fallen pillar and held her in my arms . . . Silent after the first
babble was over. And after a little while the lizards came out and
ran about again, as though nothing unusual was going on, as though
nothing had changed . . . It was tremendously still there, the sun
high and the shadows still; even the shadows of the weeds upon the
entablature were still--in spite of the thudding and banging that
went all about the sky.

"I seem to remember that the aeroplanes came up out of the
south, and that the battle went away to the west. One aeroplane
was struck, and overset and fell. I remember that--though it
didn't interest me in the least. It didn't seem to signify. It
was like a wounded gull, you know--flapping for a time in the
water. I could see it down the aisle of the temple--a black thing
in the bright blue water.

"Three or four times shells burst about the beach, and then
that ceased. Each time that happened all the lizards scuttled in
and hid for a space. That was all the mischief done, except that
once a stray bullet gashed the stone hard by--made just a fresh
bright surface.

"As the shadows grew longer, the stillness seemed greater.

"The curious thing," he remarked, with the manner of a man who
makes a trivial conversation, "is that I didn't _think_-