nt, it seemed that everything remained to be done.
As she left the little square with its tall slender gabled houses and
plunged into the narrow street that led to her house on the wall, the
story of her life in Huymonde spread itself before her in a string of
scenes that now--now alas! but never before--seemed to find their
natural sequence in this tragedy. Nine years before she had come to
Huymonde with her artist husband; but the great art of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries was already dying or dead in Flanders, and with it
the artistic sense, and the honour once paid to it. Huymonde made delft
still, and pottery, but on old conventional lines, in an endless
repetition of old formal patterns, with no touch of genius or
appreciation. Trade, and a desire to win the florid ease, the sleek
comfort of the burgher, possessed the town wholly. The artist had found
himself a stranger in a strange land; had struggled on, despising and
despised, in the quaint house on the wall, at which he had snatched on
his first coming because it looked over the open country. There, after
seven years, he had slipped out of life, scarcely better known, and no
whit more highly appreciated than on the day of his arrival.

After that the story was of two women living _sola cum sola_--one wholly
for the other--suspected, if not disliked, by their neighbours, and for
their part alien in all their thoughts and standards; since the artist's
widow could not forget that he had been the favourite pupil of Peter
Paul's old age, or that her father had counted quarterings. _Sola cum
sola_, until one day the war began, and Huymonde set about looking to
its defences. Then a young man appeared on a certain evening to inspect
the House on the Wall, and see that the window, which looked out upon
the level country side, was safely and properly built up and
strengthened.

"You must have a sergeant and guard billeted here!" was his first sharp
word; and the widow had sighed at this invasion of their privacy, which
was also their poverty. But the young girl, standing sideways in that
very window, which was to be closed, had pouted her red lips and frowned
on the intruder, and the sergeant had not come, nor the guard. Instead
the young man had returned, at first weekly, then at shorter intervals,
to see that the window defences remained intact; and with his appearance
life in the House on the Wall had become a different thing. He was the
son of the Burgoma