Looking out of her bedroom window in the morning, Mona sees nothing but a desolate black waste where the crowded compounds have been. Four unborn springs and summers buried in the bosom of the blackened fields--when, oh when will they grow green again? Only in the Third Compound is there any activity. Few men are left even there. Oskar has told her he is to leave with the last batch, but the time for him to go is coming on inexorably. The “houses” are empty, the “creatures” no longer call, and the unnatural silence of the farmyard oppresses her. As long as she had the work of three farm hands to do her strength never failed her, but now that she has only to attend to herself she is always tired and weary. The spring is beginning to appear, and through the open door she sees that the daffodils are blooming in the little patch of garden in front of the house. This reminds her of what she did on the day of her father’s burial, and she plucks some of the flowers, intending to lay them on his grave. There is nobody in the avenue when she walks through--between the lines of barbed-wire fences that have no faces behind them now--and past the empty guards’ houses near to the gate. There is nobody on the road either, as far as to the lych-gate of Kirk Patrick. There he lies, her father, his upright head-stone, inscribed to “Robert Craine of Knockaloe,” cheek by jowl with the sloping marbles that mark the graves of the Germans who had died during the four years of internment--all his race-hatred quenched in the peace of death. Only a few yards away, on the grass of a mound that had no stone over it, is the glass dome of artificial flowers which she herself had placed on the grave of Ludwig, the boy with the cough. The glass is cracked, no doubt by the snow and frost of winter, and the white flowers have perished. Poor father! Who knows but in a little while his dust may mingle with that of the German boy in the mother-bosom that bore them both! Oh God, how wicked is war, how cruel, how senseless! Mona is coming out of the churchyard when she hears the tapping of a mason’s chisel and then sees the mason himself behind a canvas screen, which shelters him from the winnowing of a light breeze that is blowing up from the sea. He is at work on a large block of granite, lettering a long list of names.