Accustomed to women of a more sophisticated class, Jean had at first taken her naïveté for the height of subtlety. He was always expecting her to betray herself. But after that evening with her he changed. Just such simplicity had been his wife's. Sometimes Sara Lee reminded him of her--the upraising of her eyes or an unstudied gesture. He sighed. "You are very wonderful, you Americans," he said. It was the nearest to a compliment that he had ever come. And after that evening he was always very gentle with her. Once he had protected her because Henri had asked him to do so; now he himself became in his silent way her protector. The ride home through the dark was very quiet. Sara Lee sat beside him watching the stars and growing increasingly anxious as they went, not too rapidly, toward the little house. There were no lights. Air raids had grown common in Dunkirk, and there were no street lights in the little city. Once on the highway Jean lighted the lamps, but left them very low, and two miles from the little house he put them out altogether. They traveled by starlight then, following as best they could the tall trees that marked the road. Now and then they went astray at that, and once they tilted into the ditch and had hard pulling to get out. At the top of the street Jean stopped and went on foot a little way down. He came back, with the report that new shells had made the way impassable; and again Sara Lee shivered. If the little house was gone! But it was there, and lighted too. Through its broken shutters came the yellow glow of the oil lamp that now hung over the table in the _salle à manger_. Whatever Jean's anxieties had been fell from him as he pushed open the door. Henri's voice was the first thing they heard. He was too much occupied to notice their approach. So it was that Sara Lee saw, for the last time, the miller and his son, Maurice; saw them, but did not know them, for over their heads were bags of their own sacking, with eyeholes roughly cut in them. Their hands were bound, and three soldiers were waiting to take them away. "I have covered your heads," Henri was saying in French, "because it is not well that our brave Belgians should know that they have been betrayed by those of their own number." It was a cold and terrible Henri who spoke. "Take them away," he said to the waiting men. A few moments later he turned from the door and heard Sara Lee sobbing in her room. He tapped, and on receiving no reply he went in. The room was unharmed, and by the light of a candle he saw the girl, face down on the bed. He spoke to her, but she only lay crouched deeper, her shoulders shaking. "It is war, mademoiselle," he said, and went closer. Then suddenly all the hurt of the past days, all the bitterness of the last hour, were lost in an overwhelming burst of tenderness. He bent over her and put his arms round her.