n prepared for it by the events of the last twelve hours she would
have jumped to her feet with an exclamation of natural shock and horror.
As it was, she felt a convulsive, nervous thrill without rising from her
seat. A pause. The next shell burst in line with the first, out by the
linden-trees; a third above the veranda.

"We've got that range, all right!" thought the Gray battery commander,
who had judged the distance by the staff map. This was all he wanted to
know for the present. He would let loose at the proper time to support
the infantry attack, when there were enough driblets across the road to
make a charge. The driblets kept on coming, and, one by one, the number
of dead on the road was augmented.

Marta was diverted from this process of killing by piecemeal by a more
theatric spectacle. A brigade commander of the Grays had ticked an order
over the wires and it had gone from battery to battery. Not only many
field-guns, which are the terriers of the artillery, but some guns of
siege calibre, the mastiffs, in a sudden outburst started a havoc of
tumbling walls and cornices in the upper part of the town.

Then an explosion greater than any from the shells shot a hemisphere of
light heavenward, revealing a shadowy body flying overhead, and an
instant later the heavens were illuminated by a vast circle of flame as
the dirigible that had dropped the dynamite received its death-blow. But
already the Brown infantry was withdrawing from the town, destroying
buildings that would give cover for the attack in the morning as they
went. Two or three hours after midnight fell a silence which was to last
until dawn. The combatants rested on their arms, Browns saying to Grays,
"We shall be ready for the morrow!" and Grays replying: "So shall we!"

Marta, at her window, her eyes following the movements of the display,
now here, now there, found herself thinking of many things, as in the
intermissions between the acts of a drama. She wondered if the groaning,
wounded man were crying for water or if he were wishing that some one at
home were near him. She thought of her talk with Lanstron over the
telephone and how mad and feminine and feeble it must have sounded to a
mind working in the inexorable processes of the clash of millions of
men. She saw his left hand twitching in his pocket, his right hand
gripping it to hold it still, on that afternoon when, for the first
time, she had understood his injury in the aeroplane acci