Oh, they would shatter Verdun and all its pleasant places. She would never do what she had dreamed--go when she was old and sit again in the garden of the little café by the Meuse, and reflect how here were things that did not change. She brought out the first long letter she had sent after the war began and recalled details of what she had seen--could it be but eighteen months ago that she climbed to the highest tower of the Verdun citadel and looked over the town and country--and now, why now, those very buildings were many of them in heaps--all that fair country torn open, its great trees down, its farms desolate. The infamy of it! Patsy lost no chance now to stir Sabinsport. In school, in her club, with her friends, she talked Verdun, and she asked tragically and constantly the question that she had not asked often of herself or others in the past, so absorbed was she in Belgium's relief, and that was, "_When_ are we going in? Are we going to let this thing go on? If Paris is to be ravished like Louvain, are we going to sit quiet?" It was this unanswered question, stirring in Sabinsport's unsatisfied soul, that made her take so to heart her first war casualty. It came at the very start of the diversion by the English, the diversion on the Somme, which gave the first real hope of relieving Verdun.--Mikey, Katie's son, now Lieut. Michael Flaherty, if you please, went over the top--and Mikey did not come back. They left him in No Man's Land, with a bullet through his brain--a clean, quick death, thank God--no writhing on live wires, no hours of hideous, hopeless pain in the mire, uncared for, no slow dying--just one quick stab when his blood was hot with the passion of war and his heart was at the highest. The news came straight to Dick, as Mikey had carefully planned it should. Soon after he reached France he had written back, "If anything should happen to me, Mr. Dick, I've fixed it so they'd tell you first, and I know you'll make it as easy as you can for my mother. Not that I'm worrying, but a fellow gets to looking out for things here." Mikey's thoughtfulness was justified. As Dick held the message which came to him at daybreak and tried to frame words which would be gentle and merciful, he felt utterly helpless.