The shadows still lessened in the great kitchen. The sun lay in level streaks on the centre of the stone floor, and even the twilight in the corners was big with noon. The women sat in a helpless huddle, not knowing how to go about the abnormal tasks of the abnormal day. The far-off thunders of the plain began again: vibrations as of earthquake first, then explicit sounds, unmistakable and portentous. To-day, you could distinguish among those clamors. Miss Stanley, with the first sounds, expected to have a tiny mob to quell; but their apathy did not leave them. Even the children turned that steady, hypnotized stare on her. And then Jeanne--how could she not have missed Jeanne from the assembly?--ran down the corridor with a sharp clatter. 'They are there! Soldiers--on horseback--at the gate!' And indeed now, in the sudden tragic hush, Miss Stanley could hear the faint metallic thrill and tinkle of iron bars, at a distance, struck sharply. Old Theophile roused himself as if by unconscious antediluvian habit, but Marie plucked him back and ran for the flag with the scarlet cloth cross. This she thrust into the American girl's hand. No one else moved, except that Mathilde flung her heavy skirt over her little girl's head. For one moment, Miss Stanley stood irresolute. She had never dreamed of such a tyranny of irrelevant fact. She must, for life or death,--for honor, at all events,--respond to a situation for which nothing, since her birth, had prepared her. Peace had been to her as air and sunlight--the natural condition of life. This was like being flung into a vacuum; it was death to her whole organism. Yet, somehow, she was still alive. Irony took her by the throat; and then the thought of Edmund Laye--linked, himself, with events like these, riding or marching beneath just such skies, on just such a planet, under just such a law. Never had there been, really, immunity like that which she had fancied to be the very condition of human existence. It was all human, with a wild inclusiveness that took her breath. And, whatever happened, paralysis like that which even now crept slowly up her limbs, was of the devil. Against that last ignominy she braced herself. Her muscles responded miraculously to her call for help, and she felt her feet moving across the floor. If feet could move, hands could. She rolled up the little banner and threw it in the very centre of the fire. It occurred to her as a last insult that she did not know enough German even to proclaim her nationality; but she did not falter again. Some residuum of human courage out of the past kept her body loyal--some archaic fashion of the flesh that dominated the newness of the mind. Past generations squared her shoulders for her, and gave her lips a phrase to practice.