"Refugees. Swells and mechanics, rag-pickers and shopkeepers, sweeps, schoolgirls, lacemakers, and students. Professors, priests, and prostitutes. Madame la Comtesse and her gardener’s wife, wheeling the babies in trams and go-carts. Dust-covered, dirty, done up, desperate, with faces that make you think of the damned in the Tartarus scenes of Orpheus and Eurydice. And someone squealed my name, and there was Brenda. Just got in, with three of the Sisters, and a baker’s dozen of English pupils and a herd of other miserables, evacuated from Charleroi and Huin. Three-and-a-half days on the journey, travelling by fits and starts on branch-lines—tramping when trains weren’t available. Eating whenever anything was to be had, and going without when there wasn’t! Sleeping in barns and on the floors of railway-station platforms, or waiting-rooms, when they were lucky—such a pack of tramps you never saw in your life. But Great Scott! how thundering glad I was to get hold of Brenda and whisk her away from that Chorus of the Damned in Orpheus, pent up like cattle behind ropes, and moaning and stretching their arms out to the sea!" "Why on earth the sea?" A foreign voice, resonant and rather nasal, startled Margot by answering: "Pardon, Madame. Because these most unhappy fugitives believe that salvation and safety may be found in England, from whence come those strong brown English soldiers who are fighting in Belgium now." "Are there—" Margot was beginning. But Rhona was introducing the speaker at length as Comte d’Asnay, Capitaine Commandant and Adjutant of the Belgian General Staff, Attached to the General Staff on the Third Division of the Belgian Army, and d’Asnay was saying with a smile: "Mademoiselle bestows upon me all my titles, possibly because we Belgians have so little else left." "Except Honour," snapped Rhona. "Except our Honour and our self-respect, and a few other non-negotiable securities," he said, "that do not bring us much of credit on the Bourses of Vienna and Berlin. But Madame was asking of the refugees. Many from Liége have escaped to Antwerp or into Holland, thousands are rushing from Namur into the bosom of France. But from Louvain and Brussels and Tirlemont they flock to Ostend. The steamers of the Channel service are crowded with those who have money and can obtain the necessary _laissez-passers_. Your town of Folkestone is encumbered with arrivals. Were stones pillows there would be a head for every stone. But those who have neither money nor passports—and many of these were rich a week ago—remain, as Mademoiselle has told you, to weep, and stretch their arms towards the sea."