The other letter Robbie promised has not come yet. But this evening through the kitchen window Mona sees the postman striding slowly up the garden path with his head down and a letter in his hand, and something grips at her heart. The postman gives the letter to her father, and goes off without speaking. The old man fumbles it, turning the envelope over and over in his hands. It is a large one, and it has printing across the top. At length, as if making a call on his resolution, he opens it with a trembling hand, tearing the letter as he drags it out of the envelope. He looks at it, seems to be trying to read it and finding himself unable to do so. Mona goes out to him, and he gives her the torn sheet of typewriting. “Read it, girl,” he says helplessly, and then he lays hold of the trammon tree that grows by the porch. Mona begins, “The Secretary of State for War regrets....” She stops. There is no need to go farther. Robbie has fallen in action. The truth dawns on the old man in a moment. An unseen flash as of lightning seems to strike him, and he reels as if about to fall. Mona calls to some of the farm hands, and they help her father indoors and up to bed, and then run for the nearest doctor--the English doctor of the First Compound. The old man has had a stroke. It is a slight one, but he must stay in bed for a long time and be kept absolutely quiet. No more letters or newspapers--nothing that will startle or distress him. It is his only chance. Mona does not cry, but her eyes flash and her nostrils quiver. Her hatred of the Germans is now fiercer than ever. They have killed her brother and stricken her father. May God punish them--every one of them! Not their Kings and Kaisers only, but every man, woman and child! If He does not, there is no God at all--there cannot be. _THIRD CHAPTER_ Three months pass. The Internment Camp has been growing larger and larger. There are five compounds in it now, and twenty-five thousand civilian prisoners, besides the British Commandant and his officers and guard--two thousand more. It is a big ugly blotch of booths and tents and bare ground, surrounded by barbed wire and covering with black ashes like a black hand the green pastures where the sweet-smelling farm had been. In the middle of the camp, cut off from the compounds, is the farm-house, and its outhouses, with their many cows, and its farm-servants who sleep in the rooms over the dairy. Mona is the only woman among twenty-seven thousand men. The Commandant, who is kind, calls her “The Woman of Knockaloe.” The first shock of her brother’s loss and her father’s seizure is over and she is going on with her work as before. After all the “creatures” of the cow-house have to be attended to, and if she could not leave Knockaloe before the Germans came she cannot leave it now when her father lies half-paralysed upstairs.