nnections in my country, and I am willing to
give you my parole."

"Parole for a cowardly murderer!" interrupted Dennis hotly. "You are
talking through the back of your neck, and you know it. Besides, apart
from all that, there is only one end for spies."

Then all the bluster went out of the cur, and he shivered like a man
with ague as they took him away under escort into a safe place.

In the rear of that formidable trench, which they had taken with such
gallantry, the Reedshires buried their dead. There were not many of
them, considering the fury of the fight, but the little row of white
wood crosses told of good comrades gone for ever, and had a grim
significance all its own.

Harry Hawke stood in the rain, leaning on his rifle before one of the
crosses, reading the simple inscription which the armourer-sergeant had
painted for him on the rough wood: "Jim Tiddler, 2/12th R.R.R., aged 21.
He was a good pal."

"Yus, he was a good pal," muttered Hawke, "one of the best, and so was
Mr. Wetherby. I'm glad old Tiddler's planted alongside 'im."

His wicked little eye ranged away to another chalk mound which had no
name upon it. It stood apart from the rest, and was close to that angle
of the German salient where Dennis had crouched on the night that all
the survivors would remember as long as they remembered anything. An
ugly red smear on the sandbags at the head of the mound had not been
washed away by the rain.

Two spies had been buried there, after a court martial held in a
dug-out, and one of them had been a woman, who had tried to brazen it
out in spite of the overwhelming evidence produced against them.
Threats, tears, piteous appeals for mercy, Ottilie's big black eyes, all
had proved in vain.

Then she had swallowed poison, but the tabloid she tried to pass to her
husband was intercepted, and the volley of ball cartridge that dealt
stern justice in the grey light of a wet afternoon had rid our lines of
a deadly and insidious peril that had cost us many lives.

"Shooting was too good for 'im, the dirty dog," said Private Hawke, as
he lit a woodbine and turned away.

And that was the requiem of the Von Dussels!

* * * * *

The weather brightened and the Great Push still rolled on. Day by day
the shell dumps grew to incredible size, and the British guns never
ceased their remorseless preparations. Names hitherto unknown to British
readers became household words to those a