relief. She assumed a posture of submission. Sometimes her
mother projected questions concerning the local condition, and although
she laboured to be graphic and at the same time soothing, unalarming,
her form of reply was always displeasing to the sick woman, and brought
forth ejaculations of angry impatience.

Eventually the woman slept in the manner of one worn from terrible
labour. The girl went slowly and softly to the kitchen. When she looked
from the window, she saw the four soldiers still at the barn door. In
the west, the sky was yellow. Some tree trunks intersecting it appeared
black as streaks of ink. Soldiers hovered in blue clouds about the
bright splendour of the fires in the orchard. There were glimmers of
steel.

The girl sat in the new gloom of the kitchen and watched. The soldiers
lit a lantern and hung it in the barn. Its rays made the form of the
sentry seem gigantic. Horses whinnied from the orchard. There was a low
hum of human voices. Sometimes small detachments of troopers rode past
the front of the house. The girl heard the abrupt calls of sentries. She
fetched some food and ate it from her hand, standing by the window. She
was so afraid that something would occur that she barely left her post
for an instant.

A picture of the interior of the barn hung vividly in her mind. She
recalled the knot-holes in the boards at the rear, but she admitted that
the prisoners could not escape through them. She remembered some
inadequacies of the roof, but these also counted for nothing. When
confronting the problem, she felt her ambitions, her ideals tumbling
headlong like cottages of straw.

Once she felt that she had decided to reconnoitre at any rate. It was
night; the lantern at the barn and the camp fires made everything
without their circle into masses of heavy mystic blackness. She took two
steps toward the door. But there she paused. Innumerable possibilities
of danger had assailed her mind. She returned to the window and stood
wavering. At last, she went swiftly to the door, opened it, and slid
noiselessly into the darkness.

For a moment she regarded the shadows. Down in the orchard the camp
fires of the troops appeared precisely like a great painting, all in
reds upon a black cloth. The voices of the troopers still hummed. The
girl started slowly off in the opposite direction. Her eyes were fixed
in a stare; she studied the darkness in front for a moment, before she
ventured upon a forward st