have liked a cup of coffee and a slice of bread, but the town was empty as an eggshell. She heard another explosion behind her as she reached the Calais pavé. The persistence of those Bosches! But she was persistent too, and gathered her damp clothes and battered “cardboard” to her, as she strode vigorously home. She was not sentimental--no one less so, but it may well have been that her blood quickened, and her rooted strength returned, as she found herself, once more, facing that salt wind, under those low gray skies, among which she had been bred and born. At length she came to the earth road, the signpost, and the turning, and saw the farm, the fringe of dead wallflower stalks on the ridge of the thatch, the old “shot” tower by the bridge over the moat. It was between six and seven when she passed the brick-pillared gate, noted a new bomb-hole, and signs of military occupation. Entering by the door, she found her father in the passage. “It’s our Madeleine,” he said quietly. Madeleine kissed him and told him to fetch her box in the morning, from “Seven Chimneys.” He said, “Thy room is empty,” and went into the kitchen, while she said a word to Berthe. It was true, her little room was just as she had left it a year before. She noted the fact with quiet satisfaction, but did not bother over the significance of it--over the fact that her father, who usually paid so little heed to anything that went on in the house, had kept her room untouched and empty for her. She quietly accepted the fact, conscious that he felt that neither the God to whom he muttered prayers on Sunday, nor the various temporal powers whom he obeyed, when he had to, on weekdays, really understood him or cared for him as his younger daughter did. She sat down with him, in the dim kitchen, to the evening meal, by the light of the day that was dying in thin drizzle and incessant mutter of guns. Once some fearful counter-barrage made the old panes of the oriel window rattle, and the old man said: “It’s a swine of a war, all the same!” Madeleine replied: “It’s something new for them to be bombarded in Hazebrouck!” “I’m going to take the money out of the Savings Bank,” he commented. In his mind, unused to the facilities of bookkeeping, and cradled in the cult of the worsted stocking for savings, he probably thought of his money as being held in notes or coin in the stoutly-barred vault behind the Mairie. After a long pause, during which he surveyed her hands, busy with household mending, somewhat neglected since Marie had relinquished it to Berthe, he spoke again: “You are quite a fine lady of the town!” “That will soon pass,” she answered, without ceasing to ply her needle. Later he said: “You know Marie has returned to Laventie?” Madeleine nodded. The remark was not so stupid as it sounded. He knew she knew the fact. It was his way of appealing to her. “Now you have come back, you will be just the Madeleine you used to be, and all will go on as before, won’t it?”