I am sitting up in bed, writing by the light of two candles; it is a golden light, in the pure white moonlight that fills the cell. The slit of a window opposite the bed is wide open, and the moonlight floods in. I am so cold, I have put on my big travelling coat. The moonlit air tastes of mountain tops. The stillness is immense in the small room. All the silences of the world are in the room. I cannot see the moon, nor the snow peaks; only the sky of sheer moonlight, and a dark dim mountain, looming. I am so glad to be awake and cold. VI While I was writing, something happened. An ugly sound broke the spell. Some one was coming to the hospice. There was the sound of a motor-bicycle, from a long way off, coming through the stillness. There was the calling of its horn and then it was at the door. I heard the door open, and a cry of delight; and a man's young voice, joyous, high-keyed, intense, and a woman's voice, laughing and sobbing. VII I saw the sun come up out of the snow, I saw all the marvellous things that there are between darkness and dawn. I had made myself stay awake the whole night through, to not lose one minute of the mountains. The mountains were mine, from sunset through the dusk and the dark and the moonlight, to the dark again, and through that other so different dusk that is before the dawn, to the sun's great silent rising, and the full glory of the day. VIII It was the son of the woman of the gold ear-rings and the red shawl, who had come home in the night, unexpected, for six days' leave. He was out in the morning pastures, a tall lean mountain boy, with gleaming white teeth, and brown eyes like his mother's, but laughing, and with absurd dimples in his brown young face. His mother was out with him in the dawn, the red shawl over her head, keeping close beside him as he went swinging across the pastures, her short step almost running by his long step. The Little Maître d'Hotel Our little worried grey butler is gone. His class has been called out, the class of Quatre-vingt-douze. It appears he was only forty-three. I had thought he was sixty at least. It must be because he has been anxious all his life that he seems so old. He was terribly worried and anxious when he talked to me, the night before he went, about the old father and mother he must leave. He would be going probably only somewhere back of the lines to guard a bridge or a railway, but for him it meant--who knows what darkly, helplessly imagined things? He talked a great deal in a high-pitched voice--standing there, very white in his proper livery--of bayonet attacks, of the coal he had managed to get in for the old people, of dying for France, and of his mother's rheumatism, and of the cow they had had to sell. The Garage