Part 15 (2/2)

”Will you be cautious, then?”

He turned and looked at her in the dim light. Standing so for a little while they remained silent. Then he drew a deep, quiet breath. She held out one hand, slowly; half way he bent and touched her fingers with his lips; released them. Her arm fell listlessly at her side.

After he had been gone a long while, she turned away, moving with head lowered. At the bridge she waited for him.

A red moon rose low in the east. It became golden above the trees, paler higher, and deathly white in mid-heaven.

It was long after midnight when she went into the house to light fresh candles. In the intense darkness before dawn she lighted two more and set them in an upper window on the chance that they might guide him back.

At five in the morning every clock struck five.

She was not asleep; she was lying on a lounge beside the burning candles, listening, when the door below burst open and there came the trampling rush of feet, the sound of blows, a fall----

A loud voice cried:--”Because you are armed and not in uniform!--you British swine!”--

And the pistol shots crashed through the house.

On the stairs she swayed for an instant, grasped blindly at the rail.

Through the floating smoke below the dead man lay there by the latticed window--where they had sat together--he and she----

Spectres were flitting to and fro--grey shapes without faces--things with eyes. A loud voice dinned in her ears, beat savagely upon her shrinking brain:

”You there on the stairs!--do you hear? What are those candles? Signals?”

She looked down at the dead man.

”Yes,” she said.

Through the crackling racket of the fusillade, down, down into roaring darkness she fell.

After a few moments her slim hand moved, closed over the dead man's. And moved no more.

In the moat L'Ombre still remained, unstirring; old Anne lay in the kitchen dying; and the Wood of Aulnes was swarming with ghastly shapes which had no faces, only eyes.

CHAPTER XI

THE SEED OF DEATH

It was Dr. Vail whose identification secured burial for Neeland, not in the American cemetery, but in Aulnes Wood.

When the raid into Finistere ended, and the unclean birds took flight, Vail, at Quimper, ordered north with his unit, heard of the tragedy, and went to Aulnes. And so Neeland was properly buried beside the youthful chatelaine. Which was, no doubt, what his severed soul desired. And perhaps hers desired it, too.

Vail continued on to Paris, to Flanders, got ga.s.sed, and came back to New York.

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