So, as she stood in the fading light of the October sunset, resting a moment before she returned to the farm, there was nothing petty or personal in the grim set of her features, the slow-burning anger of her eyes. She might have posed there for a symbolic figure of Woman contemplating Fate. She stood straight in her neat, almost careful dress, bought with one eye on looks and one on usefulness, solid well-kept boots and stockings, thick but without hole or wrinkle. Large boned, but so close-knit that she did not look disproportionately broad, her figure, kept in check by hard work and frugal feeding, promised to grow thick only with middle age. Anyone looking at her face would have said, “What a handsome woman,” not “What a pretty girl.” There was something below the surface that kept the red lips closed in their firm line, the round chin lifted, the gray eyes and level brows serene. Her dark hair, which she kept, while at work, tied in a duster, was neat and smooth. Her skin had the pallor of health. That internal quality that made her simple shapeliness so much more arresting than any trick of dimple, glance, or elaborate preparation and high color, was, like anything else worth having, the gradual distillation of the hard-lived generations gone before. How much of it came from the cultivators who had hung on to that low ridge between the marshes and the sea, as French and Norman, English, Burgundian and Spaniard swept over it, and how much from the Spanish blood of Alva’s colonists who had held the old block-house-farm amid all the unfriendliness of climate, native inhabitants, and chance, none can now say. Jerome Vanderlynden had a hook nose and beady brown eyes. Madeleine rather took after her mother, a Delplice of Bailleul, in her straight nose and fair complexion. But there it was, outwardly, obstinacy; inwardly--something more. It was that “something more” that clouded her smooth forehead and flashed in her stabbing, side-to-side stare. She never even dreamed of envying the properly married women who had received official and private recognition of the trouble the War had brought them. Nor did she stop to pity the hundreds of thousands of women of irregular position, who had been abandoned on the outbreak of hostilities, without resources. Her feeling, if almost impersonal, was simple, direct. This War, this “Bêtise,” this great Stupidity had taken Georges from her. She would be even with it. She put away her duster and brush, wrapped herself in her fur, and locking up, descended the ride to the wicket without glancing at the scuttling rabbits, crossed two arable fields by their narrow grass borders, and so through the north pasture entered the house by the plank bridge and the scullery door. Hanging her fur in her room, she slipped on her long blue apron, went to the kitchen, and began doing the next thing. * * * * *