For three minutes there was absolute silence in the room. The gilt clock in its glass sepulchre on the mantelpiece ticked off the seconds as loudly as a cricket on the hearth in the stillness of the night. The _maire_ speculated with more curiosity than fear as to how many more of these seconds he had to live. Never had the intervals seemed so long nor their registration so insistent. The ashes fell with a soft susurrus in the grate. The Commandant looked at the _maire_; the _maire_ looked at the Commandant. Then the Commandant smiled. It was an inscrutable smile; a smile in which the eyes participated not at all. There was merely a muscular relaxation of the lips disclosing the teeth; to the _maire_ there seemed something almost canine in it. At last the General spoke. "Gut!" he said gutturally; "you may go." * * * * * "You astonish me," I said to the _maire_, as he concluded his narrative. We were sitting in his parlour, smoking a cigar together one day in February in a town not a thousand miles from the German lines. "You know, Monsieur le Maire, they have shot many a municipal magistrate for less. I wonder they didn't make up their minds to shoot you." The _maire_ smiled. "They did," he said quietly. He carefully nicked the ash off his cigar, as he laid it down upon his desk, and opened the drawer of his escritoire. He took out a piece of paper and handed it to me. It was an order in German to shoot the _maire_ on the evacuation of the town. "You see, monsieur," he exclaimed, "your brave soldiers were a little too quick for them. You made a surprise attack in force early one morning and drove the enemy out. So surprising was it that the Staff officers billeted in my house left a box half full of cigars on my sideboard! You are smoking one of them now--a very good cigar, is it not?" It was. "And they left a good many official papers behind--what you call 'chits,' is it not?--and this one among them. Please mind your cigar-ash, monsieur! You see I rather value my own death-warrant." Moved by an irresistible impulse I rose from my chair and held out my hand. The _maire_ took it in mild surprise. "Monsieur," I said frankly, if crudely, "you are a brave man. And you have endured much." "Yes, monsieur," said the _maire_ gravely, as he glanced at a proclamation on the wall which he has added to his private collection of antiquities, "that is true. I have often been _tres fache_ to think that I who won the Michelet prize at the Lycee should have put my name to that thing over there."[26] FOOTNOTES: [25] Deputy. [26] This narrative follows with some fidelity the course of events as related to the writer by the _maire_ of the town in question. But for the most obvious of reasons the writer has deemed it his duty to suppress names, disguise events, and give the narrative something of the investiture of fiction. It is, however, true "in substance and in fact."--J.H.M. XXIV THE HILL