The lightning that had struck once at Champaubert and Montmirail was to strike again before she heard from Edmund Laye. Suddenly, with no warning, the heavens opened with that reiterant flash. Frightened stragglers over the plain, refugees from the north pushing on from beyond Sezanne in a blind stumbling dash to the southward; rumors that sprang up out of the ground so that she had but to stand still to hear the world move; indescribable distant noises, commotions less seen than sensed, on the far horizon; a casual smudge of aeroplanes on the great blue round of heaven; an earth, for no visible reason, tumultuously vibrating beneath her,--and then, at last, one hot noon, a frightened boy falling exhausted at her feet. She gave him the piece of gold which for many days had been waiting for him in her pocket, and bade him rest where he lay until he was ready for food. Marie and Theophile crouched beside him, listening to his winded babbling. Armies, armies, fighting, men riding on horses, guns and wounded--like '15, like '70, like Hell. People like themselves leaving their cottages and farms, making, with such portable treasures as they had (food, relics, poultry, babes in arms), for the shelter of a town. No town could avail them, for in the towns sat the officers, and the marketplace offered only a bigger, a more organized destruction. But the hope of shelter would take them far afield. Anything was better than to see sabres splintering your walls, and a greasy flame replacing all that had been ancestral and intimate. Better to die in the open with friends--not smoked out of your own cellar to fall on a bayonet. They knew the secular ways of war: the dwellers on the plain were the foredoomed type of the refugee, the world over. Once in so often men fought, and poor people were homeless. And now none of the '_vieux de la vieille_' were there to guard. These were the visions that assembled in Miss Stanley's brain while Marie, her lean fists clenched, reported the boy's wild talk. The lumps of fat hardened on her congealing soup; and still her mind went painfully, shuttle-wise, back and forth from her telegram--infinitely delayed, but clearly authentic--to the apocalyptic events surrounding her. Like most Americans perpetually defended by two oceans, Miss Stanley had no conception of invasion as a reality. The insult of an enemy on your own ground was one which she had never steeled herself to meet. There was no weapon in her little arsenal for a literal foe. Her knees trembled under her as she rose to look out of the window, after Marie, spent with eloquence, had left her.