such a long fainting turn when Annette went by, with a German soldier, we thought we never could bring her to life...." The rough, tired voice shook a moment, the woman rested her head again on her husband's arm, holding to him tightly. "Pierre, oh Pierre, _if we had known what was to come_,--no, we couldn't have lived through it, not any of us!" He put his great, working-man's hand on her rough hair, gently. She went on: "And then the troops who had been here did go away and the others came, and they made the few of us who were left go down into the cellars of those old houses down the road. They told us to stay there three days, and if we went out before we'd get shot. We waited for two whole days. The water they had given us was all gone, and then old Granny Arnoux said she was all alone in the world, so it wouldn't make any difference if she did get shot. She wanted to make sure that her house was all right. You know what she thought of her house! So she came up and we waited. And in half an hour we heard her crutches coming back on the road, and she was shrieking out. We ran up to see. She had fallen down in a heap. She hasn't known anything since; shakes all the time as if she were in a chill. She was the first one; she was all alone, when she saw what they had done ... and _you_ know ..." Nidart turned very white, and stood up. "God! yes, I know! _I_ was alone!" "Since then, ten days ago, the French soldiers came through. We didn't know them for sure, we were expecting to see the red trousers. I asked everybody about you, but nobody knew. There are so _many_ soldiers in an army. Then Americans came in cars and brought us bread, and blankets and some shoes, but they have leather soles and I make the children keep them for best, they wear out so. And since then the Government has let the camions that go through to the front, leave bread and meat and once a bag of potatoes for us. The préfet came around and asked if we wanted to be sent to a refugee home in Paris or stay here, and of course I said stay here. The children and I have come every day to work. We've got the plaster and bricks cleared out from the corner of the fireplace, and I cook there, though there isn't any chimney of course, but I think the tiles of the kitchen floor are mostly all there still. And oh, Pierre, we have one corner of the garden almost cleared, _and the asparagus is coming up_! Come and see! They cut down everything they could see, even the lilac bushes, but what was in the ground, alive, they couldn't kill." Nidart put the shovel in his wife's hand, and took up the pickax. "Time spent in traveling isn't counted on furloughs," he said, "so we have twenty-one days, counting to-day. The garden first, so's to get in the seeds." They clambered over the infernal disorder of the ruins of the house, and picked their way down and back into what had been the garden. A few sections of the wall were still standing, its thick solidity resisting even dynamite petards.