he King's villa and quietly,
because of many reasons, Henri, a very white and erect Henri, received a
second medal, the highest for courage that could be given.

He did not tell Sara Lee.

But though he and the men who served under him worked hard, they could
not always perform miracles. The German planes still outnumbered the
Allied ones. They had grown more daring with the spring, too, and
whatever Henri might learn of ground operations, he could not foretell
those of the air.

On a moonlight night in early May, Sara Lee, setting out her dressings,
heard a man running up the street. Rene challenged him sharply, only
to step aside. It was Henri. He burst in on Sara Lee.

"To the cellar, mademoiselle!" he said.

"A bombardment?" asked Sara Lee.

"From the air. They may pass over, but there are twelve _taubes_, and
they are circling overhead."

The first bomb dropped then in the street. It was white moonlight and
the Germans must have seen that there were no troops. Probably it was
as Henri said later, that they had learned of the little house, and
since it brought such aid and comfort as might be it was to be destroyed.

The house of the mill went with the second bomb. Then followed a
deafening uproar as plane after plane dropped its shells on the dead
town. Marie and Sara Lee were in the cellar by that time, but the
cellar was scarcely safer than the floor above. From a bombardment by
shells from guns miles away there was protection. From a bomb dropped
from the sky, the floors above were practically useless.

Only Henri and Rene remained on the street floor. Henri was
extinguishing lights. In the passage Rene stood, not willing to take
refuge until Henri, whom he adored, had done so. For a moment the
uproar ceased, and in a spirit of bravado Rene stepped out into the
moonlight and made a gesture of derision into the air.

He fell there, struck by a piece of splintered shell.

"Come, Rene!" Henri called. "The brave are those who live to fight
again, not--"

But Rene's figure against the moonlight was gone. Henri ran to the
doorway then and found him lying, his head on the little step where he
had been wont to sit and whittle and sing his Tipperaree. He was dead.
Henri carried him in and laid him in the little passage, very reverently.
Then he went below.

"Where is Rene?" Sara Lee asked from the darkness.

"A foolish boy," said Henri, a catch in his throat. "He is, I think,
watching these fiends of th