Brand remembered where he had found it, though he had not given a thought to it for more than two years. He had found it on a night in No Man’s Land out by the Bois Français, near Fricourt. He had been lying out there on the lip of a mine crater below a hummock of white chalk. Just before dawn a German patrol had crept out, and he had shot at them. One man dropped quite close to where Brand lay. After an hour, when dawn came with a thick white mist rising from the moist earth, Brand crawled over to the body and cut off its shoulder-straps for identification. It was the body of a young man, almost a boy, and Brand saw, with a thrill of satisfaction (it was his “tiger” time), that he had shot him clean through the heart. A good shot in the twilight of the dawn! He thrust his hands into the man’s pockets for papers, and found his pay-book and some letters, and a cigarette-case. With these he crawled back into his own trench. He remembered reading the letters. One was from the boy’s sister, lamenting the length of the war, describing the growing hunger of civilians in Germany, and saying how she prayed every night for her brother’s safety, and for peace. He had read thousands of German letters as an intelligence officer afterwards, but he remembered those because of the night’s adventure. He had handed them over to the adjutant, for headquarters, and had kept the cigarette-case, having lost his own. It had the monogram of “H. v. K.” He had never thought about it from that time to this. Now he thought about it with an intensity of remembrance. Brand told Elsa von Kreuzenach that he had found the box in No Man’s Land. “It is my brother Heinrich’s,” she cried. “I gave it to him.” She drew back, shivering, from the cigarette-case--or was it from Brand? When she spoke next it was in a whisper: “Did you kill him?” Brand lied to her, and she knew he was lying. She wept bitterly, and when Brand kissed her she was cold, and fainted in his arms. That was Brand’s story, and it was incredible. Even now I cannot help thinking that such a coincidence could not have happened. There is plenty of room for doubt about that cigarette-case. It was of a usual pattern, plain, with a wreath engraved round a monogram. That monogram “H. v. K.” was astonishing in relation to Elsa von Kreuzenach, but there are thousands of Germans, I imagine, with the same initials. I know two, Hermann von Kranitz and Hans von Kurtheim. In a German directory I have found many other names with those initials. I refuse to believe that Brand should have gone straight to the house of that boy whom he had killed in No Man’s Land. He believed it, and Elsa was sure of it. That was the tragedy, and the ghost of the girl’s dead brother stood between them now. For an hour or more he paced up and down my room in an agony of mind, and none of my arguments would convince him or comfort him. Several times he spoke one sentence which puzzled me.