Shall he return to the camp? Stain his hands, too, with the blood of these innocents? "When the master speaks the servant must hearken," they say back home. He must obey. Something flashes in front of him like the flash of a gun. "A bullet," he thinks. "Would it were one!" he exclaims in the torment of his soul. It is only a sun ray which suddenly shoots through the mist. But it has shown a poor mortal the right way. They found the Raskolnik just outside the village--in his breast his own bullet, in his right hand the cross. On his lips the smile of peace that passeth understanding. TALE OF THE SAVING OF PARIS _How a Woman's Wit Averted a Great Disaster_ Little by little the "inner history" of the Great War is coming to light. This remarkable story shows how the presence of mind of a humble woodman's widow, in the early days of hostilities, led to the preservation of the Western Railway of France, on which at that time Paris depended for its supplies and the transport of troops. Told in the _Wide World_. I--IN NORMANDY--STORY OF OCTAVIE DELACOURT In a clearing of the Forêt de Lyons, near Martagny, in Normandy, and by the side of a barely distinguishable road, stands the rustic half-timbered cottage of Octavie Delacourt. A solitary habitation indeed, but one well fitted to the mental outlook of a lonely woman--no fair young heroine of romance, as some readers may hastily conclude, but a widow of over fifty with hair turning a silvery grey. Her husband--a forester, and the builder of the little home--had died from a fever a year before the war. Childless, she had elected to live on there alone, partly through necessity, partly because of the memories which the surroundings stirred in her mind whenever she went forth to collect sticks for her fire, or when, lying in bed at night, she heard the wind in the trees. Twenty years with "her man," twenty years of labour in common, had made her a fervent lover of the forest. It had become, as it were, her domain. Certainly no one knew better its confusing tangle of roads and pathways. The outbreak of the war naturally had an effect on the mind and habits of Octavie Delacourt, but, alone in the world as she was, it affected her much less than it had done her friends and acquaintances in the neighbouring villages. In her case the war fever took the form of restlessness--an eager, insatiable desire to learn the truth about the danger which was threatening her dear France.