"There is no shelter," shivered the girl. He groped for her hand in the darkness, and so they stood, hand in hand, like two children, waiting for what might come. It was not until the thing was over that he told her. He had gone up first and so that she would not happen on his silent figure unwarned, had carried René to the open upper floor, where he lay, singularly peaceful, face up to the awful beauty of the night. "Good night, little brother," Henri said to him, and left him there with a heavy heart. Never again would René sit and whittle on the doorstep and sing his tuneless Tipperaree. Never again would he gaze with boyish adoring eyes at Sara Lee as she moved back and forth in the little house. Henri stared up at the sky. The moon looked down, cold, and cruelly bright, on the vanishing squadron of death, on the destroyed town and on the boy's white face. Somewhere, Henri felt, vanishing like the German _taubes_, but to peace instead of war, was moving René's brave and smiling spirit--a boyish angel, eager and dauntless, and still looking up. Henri took off his cap and crossed himself. Another sentry took René's place the next day, but the little house had lost something it could not regain. And a greater loss was to come. Jean brought out the mail that day. For Sara Lee, moving about silent and red-eyed, there was a letter from Mr. Travers. He inclosed a hundred pounds and a clipping from a London newspaper entitled The Little House of Mercy. "Evidently," he wrote, "you were right and we were wrong. One-half of the inclosed check is from my wife, who takes this method of showing her affectionate gratitude. The balance is from myself. Once, some months ago, I said to you that almost you restored my faith in human nature. To-day I may say that, in these hours of sorrow for us all, what you have done and are doing has brought into my gray day a breath of hope." There was another clipping, but no comment. It recorded the death of a Reginald Alexander Travers, aged thirty. It was then that Sara Lee, who was by way of thinking for herself those days, and of thinking clearly, recognized the strange new self-abnegation of the English--their attitude not so much of suppressing their private griefs as of refusing to obtrude them. A strongly individualistic people, they were already commencing to think nationally. Grief was a private matter, to be borne privately. To the world they must present an unbroken front, an unshaken and unshakable faith. A new attitude, and a strange one, for grumbling, crochety, gouty-souled England. A people who had for centuries insisted not only on its rights but on its privileges was now giving as freely as ever it had demanded. It was as though, having hoarded all those years, it had but been hoarding against the day of payment. As it had received it gave--in money, in effort, in life. And without pretext.