As she passed the stable, Donahue whinnied lovingly at the sound of her step. But she dared not stop. For she knew that if she stopped now, and broke down and cried with her pet and friend, the miserable end would be that she would run to where Jimmie was and throw herself on her knees to him and beg weakly for his love. And--the shame of it!--he would talk, and talk, and talk, and in the end she would live on with him, to hate herself and him. So her eyes were dry and her little shoulders bravely set as she trudged on down through the fringe of trees and into the brook path. She did not know the cross-cuts by which Jimmie went to the station every week--Oh yes, Jimmie went to the station every week!--but she knew the direction fairly well. She would find it. She did not know how many trains there were in the day, but she was quite sure that there would be one before she could be missed and overtaken. Jimmie had gone fishing for the day. Now this last thing one would rather not tell. Studied design could not have found anything quite so cruel to have done to her. It is, in fact, left for accident and blind, silly coincidence to furnish the most terrible thrusts of life. When Augusta came, still dry-eyed and hurrying, down the dusty road to the little station, she saw a man going away from the station and starting across the fields. He did not see her. It was Jimmie. He had not gone fishing. IX "Charles of Burgundy Comes, Thirteen Fifty-Eight--" "He's a boob if he comes here!" "That don't mean comes, you nut," some scholar elucidated. "_Comes_ means Duke. Charles, Duke of Burgundy. He built the bridge." "Wish t'ell he'd built it straight east and west." Don Mallet threw down the thin stone tablet in disgust. It had landed a moment before in the pit of his stomach. A German shell exploding a little distance on the other side of the bridge coping had gently lobbed the stone plate out of the wall where it had rested four and a half centuries and shied it playfully at Mallet where he sat on the ground. When Charles of Burgundy had his name cut in that stone tablet and had it set in the bridge he did not foresee Mallet, nor the need of a bridge running east and west. But Mallet was here, and fifteen others, all heartily approving his wish for a slight change in the alignment of the bridge, all except a German machine gunner and an American corporal who lay head to head close under the coping of the wall, with the body of a "pup" tent stretched impartially over their heads, and who did not care. This party, with a lieutenant in command, had crossed the river to the north side before dawn. Behind them from the hills beyond the river the American artillery, as fast as it could come up to the river brow, was getting to work, firing high above this party and a score of other parties that had crossed the river in the dark under orders to find cover and stay.