The Baron, moreover, like so many of his age and nation at that time, had his private sorrow. Sharing his meals with the ever-changing messes of officers that filled his salle-à-manger (for the village being evacuated, there were no shops, and he was glad enough to trade away the accommodation he could to provide for food), he would stare round the youthful, unwarlike faces about him, faces of professional or business men, farmers or engineers from all corners of Great Britain or the Colonies, and would mutter, “I have no longer my son!” Madeleine, more self-controlled, wore black. No funeral service had been said for Jerome Vanderlynden. He had “disappeared” in the trite phrase of the Casualty Lists. The old church in the “place” of Hondebecq had three gaping shell-holes in the roof. The doors were closed, and it was declared in brief official notice “Unsafe.” She did not even know if her numerous cousins and relations by marriage, scattered by the evacuation all across France from Evreux to Bordeaux, had heard what had happened to him. Nor did the thought of them greatly trouble her, accustomed to think and act for herself. She was doing what she knew so well her father was expecting of her. She was looking after the farm. The crops were sown. Such beasts as remained were tended. Jerome Vanderlynden had disappeared! That could not be helped, any more than the thefts of all the fowls from the yard. Madeleine just went on. * * * * * The days went by, and the two civilians left in Hondebecq hardly noticed a change that came over things in the last week of July, 1918. That war, continuing year in and year out, could not be measured according to its “victories” of one side or the other, by people so intensely intimate with it, because they lived on the edge of the trenches. The most perhaps that they noticed was the gradual cessation of the shelling. It was no longer necessary to run to dugouts from one’s bed at dawn, or from one’s evening meal. Yet, at last, something really had happened. Madeleine was dimly conscious of a new atmosphere in the shuttered and sand-bagged salle-à-manger, when she went up on one of her usual errands to the château. The old interpreter, Mercadet, attached to the area, was sticking flags in the map of the Western Front, with his melancholy precision. “One has still some force left!” he announced, and Madeleine saw without heeding that he was _moving the flags forward, instead of back_. It was, of course, Mangin’s flank attack of July, the turning-point of the war. She paid more attention, however, a week or two later, when the troops in the farm began to move. The Bosche were gone from Kemmel Hill, was all they said. She lost touch with the war at this point, having no one to give her news.