He greeted her with his professional aplomb: “Good day, Maddam, dinner for twelve officers; compris, douze!” He held up the fingers of both hands and then two fingers separately. “All right!” returned Madeleine in English. “Where are their rations?” He replied, “Ah, you’re sharp!” and called to his storekeeper, “Jermyn, officers’ rations to Maddam and tell the mess cook!” He went on to bargain for other things--beds for the Colonel, the Adjutant and himself--and in the course of the argument Madeleine informed him that according to General Routine Orders there was to be no smoking in the barns and no insanitary practices, that all gates must be kept closed, and no movables removed. Handing him her price list, she withdrew to her long coffin-shaped stove in the brick-floored kitchen. * * * * * Dusk settled down on the Spanish Farm--autumn dusk--with swathed mists on the small flat chocolate-coloured fields, richest and best tilled in the world--not bare of crops. The brilliant colours of the last hop-leaves and of the regular rows of elms that bordered each pasture were hidden, but the tops of the trees towered above the mist-line into that wide blue vault that the old painters loved, nowhere wider than in the Flemish plain. The Spanish Farm stood on the almost imperceptible southern slope of the sandy ridge that divides in some degree the valley of the Yser from that of the Lys, whose flat meadows lay spread out, almost from Aire to the factory smoke of Armentières, at a slightly lower level to the south. Northward, behind the house, the ground rose very gradually in fertile field and elm-encircled pasture. Westward, black against the last glow of the sunset, two little ’planes droned their way from the aerodromes round St. Omer toward the eastern horizon where the evening “hate” was toned down by the distance to the low boom of “heavies,” the sharper note of the field-guns, the whip-lash crack of rifles and machine-guns, and the flatter squashed-out reports of mortars and grenades. The house itself was a single-storied building of immensely thick walls of red brick--much as the settlers under Alva had left it three hundred years before--except for enlargement of windows and re-thatching--though the existing thatch was so old that wall-flowers tasselled its ridge from one octagonal spoke-tiled chimney-stack to the other. Originally a simple block with door in the middle, outbuildings had been added at each end, giving it the form of an unfinished quadrangle, the gap toward the south, enclosing the great steaming midden of golden dung. Completely surrounded by a deep wide moat, access to it was only possible by a brick bridge on the southern side, guarded by a twenty-foot extinguisher-roofed “shot” tower, whose loopholed bulk now served for tool shed below and pigeon-loft above.