d so on!"

The major smiled. It seemed the safe thing to do. He did not know but
the young woman might charge.

"Mademoiselle, I am sorry, but unless you live in this direction," he
said very politely, "you may not go any farther. Until we have other
orders or they attack, every one is supposed to remain in his house or
his place of business."

"This is my place of business!" Marta answered, for she was already
opposite a small, disused chapel which was her schoolroom, where a half
dozen of the faithful children were gathered around the masculine
importance of Jacky Werther, one of the older boys.

"Then you are Miss Galland!" said the major, enlightened. His smile had
an appreciation of the irony of her occupation at that moment. "Your
children are very loyal. They would not tell me where they lived, so we
had to let them stay there."

"Those who have homes," she said, identifying each one of the faithful
with a glance, "have so many brothers and sisters that they will hardly
be missed from the flock. Others have no homes--at least, not much of a
one"--here her temper rose again--"taxes being so high in order that you
may organize murder and the destruction of property."

"I--" gasped the major under the fire of those black eyes.

But their flashes suddenly splintered into less threatening lights as
she realized the fatuity of this personal allusion.

"Oh, I'm not the town scold!" she explained with a nervous little laugh
that helped her to recover poise.

With the black eyes in this mood, the major was conscious only of a
desire to please which conflicted with duty.

"Now, really, Miss Galland," he began solicitously, "I have been
assigned to move the civil population in case of attack. Your children
ought--"

"After school! You have your duty this morning and I have mine!" Marta
interrupted pleasantly, and turned toward the chapel.

"They are putting sharpshooters in the church tower to get the
aeroplanes, and there are lots of the little guns that fire bullets so
fast you can't count 'em--and little spring wagons with dynamite to blow
things up--and--" Jacky Werther ran on in a series of vocal explosions
as Marta opened the door to let the children go in.

"Yet you came!" said Marta with a hand caressingly on his shoulder.

"It looks pretty bad for peace, but we came," answered Jacky,
round-eyed, in loyalty. "We'd come right through the bullets 'cause we
said we would if we wasn't sick, and we wasn'