Directly in line of them rose the fortified City of Liége, termed "the Birmingham of Belgium," holding in the suburb of Seraign, five miles distant from the city, the huge Cockerill machine-plant and foundry, one of the largest ironworks in the world. They had stayed three hours at the frontier station of Visé, a Belgium Custom House town of less than 4,000 inhabitants, where a few squadrons of Belgian Cavalry and the Belgian 12th Line Regiment, aided by some heroic peasants, farmers, and townspeople had risen up with desperate gallantry to oppose their inevitable advance. They had written the sign-manual of the Hun upon the ashes of Visé in the blood of its massacred inhabitants. Frightfulness, the many-headed hydra, was uncaged and let loose ere they rolled on to Liége peeved by their three hours’ intolerable delay. While I who write and you who read far from the sound of fusillades, or the crash of shells or the yells of peasants dying amongst the flames of burning houses, learned of these deeds from the shrilly clamorous headlines, and asked one another with raised eyebrows, in incredulous voices: "_Can these hideous things possibly have been done?_" Patrine had no doubt that they had been done!—were being done even while she sat waiting in Sherbrand’s church for Sherbrand. Did she not know von Herrnung? Were not his fellow-officers and the soldiers he and they commanded, lustful, brutal, cruel, rapacious, arrogant, and pitiless even as he? He was a Type—not the isolated example of a new species. It would not be easily stamped out; its dominating characteristics would write themselves upon a conquered race. Those outraged wives, those violated daughters of Belgium would live to see it reproduced in the living fruit of their humiliation. What honest man could bear to stoop over his wife’s bedside and meet the eyes of the Enemy looking at him—from the face of a new-born child! A rigor of horror seized upon her body and shook it. Her jaw dropped, her eyes closed as though they shrank and withered under their contracting lids. She slid from her seat and fell upon her knees helplessly. Her head sank forwards upon the hands that rose instinctively to hide her face. In the same instant Sherbrand’s low voice speaking behind her turned the heart in her bosom to ice. "Dearest—I am ready, that is if you are? My keeping you was unavoidable. I am going to Communion with my mother, before the Funeral Mass to-morrow, and I wanted to make my Confession first. Has the time seemed long?" "Not long. Shall we go now?"