At five in the morning every clock struck five. She was not asleep; she was lying on a lounge beside the burning candles, listening, when the door below burst open and there came the trampling rush of feet, the sound of blows, a fall---- A loud voice cried:--"Because you are armed and not in uniform!--you British swine!"-- And the pistol shots crashed through the house. On the stairs she swayed for an instant, grasped blindly at the rail. Through the floating smoke below the dead man lay there by the latticed window--where they had sat together--he and she---- Spectres were flitting to and fro--grey shapes without faces--things with eyes. A loud voice dinned in her ears, beat savagely upon her shrinking brain: "You there on the stairs!--do you hear? What are those candles? Signals?" She looked down at the dead man. "Yes," she said. Through the crackling racket of the fusillade, down, down into roaring darkness she fell. After a few moments her slim hand moved, closed over the dead man’s. And moved no more. In the moat L’Ombre still remained, unstirring; old Anne lay in the kitchen dying; and the Wood of Aulnes was swarming with ghastly shapes which had no faces, only eyes. CHAPTER XI THE SEED OF DEATH It was Dr. Vail whose identification secured burial for Neeland, not in the American cemetery, but in Aulnes Wood. When the raid into Finistère ended, and the unclean birds took flight, Vail, at Quimper, ordered north with his unit, heard of the tragedy, and went to Aulnes. And so Neeland was properly buried beside the youthful châtelaine. Which was, no doubt, what his severed soul desired. And perhaps hers desired it, too. Vail continued on to Paris, to Flanders, got gassed, and came back to New York. He had aged ten years in as many months. Gray, the younger surgeon, kept glancing from time to time at Vail’s pallid face, and the latter understood the professional interest of the younger man. "You think I look ill?" he asked, finally. "You don’t look very fit, Doctor." "No.... I’m _going West_." "You mean it?" "Yes." "Why do you think that you are--_going West_?" "There’s a thing over there, born of gas. It’s a living thing, animal or vegetable. I don’t know which. It’s only recently been recognized. We call it the ’Seed of Death.’" Gray gazed at the haggard face of the older man in silence. Vail went on, slowly: "It’s properly named. It is always fatal. A man may live for a few months. But, once gassed, even in the slightest degree, if that germ is inhaled, death is certain." After a silence Gray began: "Do you have any apprehension--" And did not finish the sentence. Vail shrugged. "It’s interesting, isn’t it?" he said with pleasant impersonality. After a silence Gray said: "Are you doing anything about it?" "Oh, yes. It’s working in the dark, of course. I’m feeling rottener every day." He rested his handsome head on one thin hand: