So he was going to pay. The room was emptying now, there were no troops in the village, and most of the officers lunching there (with shy propitiatory looks toward the A.P.M.) had some way to ride to get back to their units. Here was Mademoiselle ready to go and show them the damage. She wore no hat, but her clothes were good of their kind and she carried the day’s takings clasped to her breast, in a solid little leather dolly-bag, far from new. The A.P.M. allowed her the rare privilege of a lift in the car. They went back over the same road that the two officers had followed in the morning. Once more Dormer had his queer feelings. There was something wrong about this. Three times over the same road and nothing done. As they turned into the by-road, Mademoiselle Vanderlynden held up her hand. “Stop here, please!” They were at the corner of the big pasture before the house. There was an ordinary hedge, like an English one, thickened at this angle into a tiny copse, with a dozen young poplars. Mademoiselle soon found a gap in the fence and led them through, remarking, “The troops made this short cut!” They found themselves in Vanderlynden’s pasture, like hundreds of others over a hundred miles of country. There were no troops in it at the moment, but it had the air of being continuously occupied. In long regular lines the grass had been trampled away. Posts and wire, and a great bank of manure marked the site of horse-lines. Nearer the house, tents had been set up from time to time, and circles, dotted with peg and post holes, appeared half obliterated. At the corners of the field were latrines, and at one spot the cookers had blackened everything. “Billets for the troops!” reflected Dormer, to whom the idea of lodging in the open had never ceased to be a thoroughly bad joke. “Stables for horses, stables for men!” Obviously enough the machinery of War had been here in full swing. Dormer (a man of no imagination) could almost see before him the khaki-clad figures, the sullen mules, the primitive vehicles filing into the place, tarrying ever so briefly and filing out again to be destroyed. But Mademoiselle Vanderlynden was occupied with the matter in hand, and led to the other side of the coppice, where there had been built by some previous generation of pious Vanderlyndens a little shrine. It was perhaps eight feet high, six feet thick, and had its glazed recess towards the main road. But the glazing was all broken, the altar torn down, and all those small wax or plaster figures or flowers, vases, and other objects of the trade in “votive offerings” and _objets de piété_ which a Vanderlynden would revere so much more because he bought them at a _fournitures ecclésiastiques_, rather than made them with his own hands, were missing. Army wire had been used to fasten up the gaping aperture.