ur life."

XXI

By the time Henri was well enough to resume his former activities it was
almost the first of May. The winter quiet was over with a vengeance, and
the Allies were hammering hard with their first tolerably full supply of
high-explosive shells.

Cheering reports came daily to the little house--, of rapidly augmenting
armies, of big guns on caterpillar trucks that were moving slowly up to
the Allied Front. Great Britain had at last learned her lesson, that
only shells of immense destructiveness were of any avail against the
German batteries. She was moving heaven and earth to get them, but the
supply was still inadequate. With the new shells experiments were being
made in barrage fire--costly experiments now and then; but the Allies
were apt in learning the ugly game of modern war.

Only on the Belgian Front was there small change. The shattered army
was being freshly outfitted. England was sending money and ammunition,
and on the sand dunes small bodies of fresh troops drilled and smiled
grimly and drilled again. But there were not, as in England and in
France, great bodies of young men to draw from. Too many had been
caught beyond the German wall of steel.

Yet a wave of renewed courage had come with the sun and the green
fields. And conditions had improved for the Belgians in other ways.
They were being paid, for one thing, with something like regularity.
Food was better and more plentiful. One day Henri appeared at the top
of the street and drove down triumphantly a small unclipped horse,
which trundled behind it a vertical boiler on wheels with fire box and
stovepipe.

"A portable kitchen!" he explained. "See, here for soup and here for
coffee. And more are coming."

"Very soon, Henri, they will not need me," Sara Lee said wistfully.

But he protested almost violently. He even put the question to the
horse, and blowing in his ear made him shake his head in the negative.

She was needed, indeed. To the great base hospital at La Panne went
more and more wounded men. But to the little house of mercy came the
small odds and ends in increasing numbers. Medical men were scarce, and
badly overworked. There was talk, for a time, of sending a surgeon to
the little house, but it came to nothing. La Panne was not far away,
and all the surgeons they could get there were not too many.

So the little house went on much as before. Henri had moved to the mill.
He was at work again, and one day, in t