The old man pleads with the girl. Is she going to leave him alone? “Me growing old, too, and Robbie at the war!” At length Mona consents. She will remain for her father’s sake, but she hates the thought of living in the midst of Germans and helping to provide for them. “It will be worse than being at the war--a thousand times worse.” It is a fortnight later. Huge wagons, full of bricks and timber and other building materials, with vast rolls of barbed wire, have been arriving at the farm, and a multitude of bricklayers and carpenters have been working all day long and half the night. Ugly stone-paved paths have been cut through the green fields; the grass-grown lane from the farm-house to the high road has been made into a broad bare avenue; gorse-covered hedges, already beginning to bloom, have been torn down, and long rows of hideous wooden booths have been thrown up and then tarred and pitched on their faces and roofs. It has been like magic--black magic, Mona calls it. Already a large area on the left of the avenue, encompassed by double lines of barbed wire, which look like cages for wild beasts, is ready for occupation. It is called Compound Number One. Mona is now the only woman on the land, the maids being dismissed, and men and boys employed to take their places. The last of the girls to go is a pert young thing from Peel. Her name is Liza Kinnish, and before the war she used to make eyes at Robbie. Now that other men are to come she wants to remain, but Mona packs her off with the rest. It is evening. Mona hears the whistle of the last train pulling up in the railway station, and a little later the cadenced tramp, tramp, tramp, as of an advancing army on the high road. It is the first of the Germans. From the door of the house she looks at them as they come up the avenue--a long procession of men in dark civilian clothes, marching in double file, with a thinner line of British soldiers on either side of them. Mona shudders. She thinks they look like a long black serpent. Next morning from the window of her bedroom Mona sees more of them. They are a sullen-looking lot, but generally well-dressed and with a certain air of breeding. On going towards the cow-house she speaks to one of the guard. He tells her they are the best she is likely to see. Many of them are well-to-do men. Some are rich, and have been carrying on great businesses in London and living in large houses and even mansions. Later she hears from her father that they are grumbling about their quarters and the food provided for them. “Let them,” she says. “They deserve no better.” In a half-hearted way the old man excuses them. After all they are prisoners, cut off from their wives and children. “Well, and what worse off are they than our men who are fighting at the front? The hypocrites! The traitors!” “You’re hard, woman, you’re hard,” says the old man.