“Be quiet, father,” says Mona. “You know what the doctor said. Besides, is it Christian-like to follow the sins of a man to the next world and wish his soul in hell?” But when she is alone in her own room she knows that her Christian charity is all a delusion. “Oh God help me! God help me! Send me something to help me,” she cries. One morning in summer the Commandant calls on her father and she leads him upstairs. He takes a little leather-covered case out of his pocket and, opening it by its spring, shows a military medal. “What is it?” asks the old man. “The Victoria Cross, old friend, won by your son for conspicuous bravery in battle and sent to you by the King.” The old man wipes his eyes and says: “But who is to wear it now that Robbie is gone?” “May I make a suggestion?” says the Commandant. “Let your daughter wear it. Why not?” “Yes, yes, why not?” says Mona, and she seizes it convulsively and pins it on her breast. Next morning, feeling braver, with the medal on her breast, she looks Oskar Heine full in the face when he comes to the dairy door as usual. He sees it and asks what it is and where it came from, and with a proud lift of the head she tells him, almost defiantly, about Robbie and what he did at the war. “What a splendid fellow your brother must have been,” says Oskar. Mona gasps. All her pride and defiance seem to be stricken out of her in a moment. The English newspapers continue to come, and one evening, in the midst of reports of indescribable German barbarities, Mona finds a letter from an English soldier to his family telling of a good act by an enemy. He had been wounded in an engagement in Belgium and, left all day for dead on the battlefield, he had crawled at night on his stomach over half a mile of churned-up land to a lonely farmhouse, being drawn to it by a dim light in a window. The farmer had turned out to be an old German, but he had been “a white man” for all that, and though some of the officers of the victorious German army were even then drinking and singing and making merry in his front parlour, he had smuggled the wounded British lad into his cellar, and helped him to escape in the morning. Some dizzy impulse, vaguely associated with misty thoughts of Oskar, causes Mona to carry the newspaper upstairs and to read the boy’s letter to her father. “So there’s good and bad in all races, you see. That old German farmer must be a good creature,” she says. Whereupon the old man, who has pulled himself up in bed to listen, says, with tight-set lips and an angry frown: “Maybe he is, but who knows if he isn’t the father of the brute who fired the explosive bullet into my son’s heart?” Mona drops the newspaper and flies from the room, and the old man cries after her in a whimpering voice: “What’s coming over thee, girl? I can’t tell in the world what’s coming over thee.” _FIFTH CHAPTER_