rom the doorway and then her mother's hand was pressing her arm.

"Marta, if you remain out here, I shall!" announced Mrs. Galland.

"I was just coming in," said Marta.

Dellarme, his cap held before him in the jaunty fashion of officers,
bowed, his face beaming his happiness at her decision.

As they entered the dining-room Marta saw that the shell which had
entered the window had burst just over the heavy mahogany table and a
fragment of the jacket had cut a long scar in the rich fibre. She
paused, her breath coming and going hotly. She felt the smarting pain of
a file drawn over the skin. The table was very old; for generations it
had been a family treasure. As a child she had loved its polished
surface and revered its massive solidity.

"Oh! Oh! Somebody ought to be made to pay for such wickedness!" she
exclaimed wrathfully.

"It will plane down and it is nothing we could help, Marta," said Mrs.
Galland. "Fortunately, all the portraits were out of the room."

"Mother, you--you are just a little too philosophical!" complained
Marta.

"Come!" Mrs. Galland slipped her hand into Marta's. "Two women can't
fight both armies. Come! I prescribe hot coffee It is waiting; and, do
you know, I find a meal in the kitchen very cosey."

Being human and not a heroine fed on lotos blossoms, and being exhausted
and also hungry, when she was seated at table, with Minna adroitly
urging her, Marta ate with the relish of little Peterkin in the shell
crater munching biscuits from his haversack.

XXVII

HAND TO HAND

With Mrs. Galland on guard, insistent that wherever her daughter went
she should go, Marta might not so easily expose herself again. For the
time being she seemed hardly of a mind to. She sat staring at the
kitchen clock on the wall in front of her, the only sign of any break in
the funereal march of her thoughts being an occasional deep-drawn
breath, or a shudder, or a clenching of the hands, or a bitter smile of
irony.

An hour or more of intermittent firing passed in the suspense of
listening to a trickle of water undermining a dam. Then, with the roar
of waters carrying away the dam, a cataract of shell fire broke and
continued in far heavier volume than that of the first attack.

"The last war was nothing like this!" murmured Mrs. Galland.

At every concussion against the walls of the house, at every crash
within the house, Marta pressed her nails tighter into her palms.
Abruptly as the inferno