ene, great clouds from
the west were sweeping, with fringes of rain and sudden bursts of light
or shadow, which in their perpetual movement--suggesting attack from the
sky and response from the earth--gave drama and symbol to the landscape.

On the south--things very different! First, an interlocked range of
hills, forest-clothed, stretching east and west, and, at the very feet of
the two women, a forest valley offering much that was strange to English
eyes. Two years before it had been known only to the gamekeeper and the
shooting guests of a neighbouring landowner. Now a great timber camp
filled it. The gully ran far and deep into the heart of the forest
country, with a light railway winding along the bottom, towards an unseen
road. The steep sides of the valley--Rachel and Janet stood on the edge
of one of them--were covered with felled trees, cut the preceding winter,
and left as they fell. The dead branch and leaf of the trees had turned
to a rich purple, and dyed all the inside of the long deep cup. But along
its edges stretched the forest, still untouched, and everywhere, in the
bare spaces left here and there by the felling among the "rubble and
woody wreck," green and gold mosses and delicate grasses had sprung up,
a brilliant enamel, inlaid with a multitude of wild flowers.

"Look!" cried Rachel.

For suddenly, down below them, a huge trunk began to move as though of
its own accord. Hissing and crashing like some gray serpent, it glided
down the hill-side, till it approached a group of figures and horses
congregated at the head of the valley, near an engine puffing smoke. Then
something invisible happened, and presently a trolley piled high with
logs detached itself from the group, and set out on a solitary journey
down the railway, watched here and there by men in queer uniforms with
patches on their backs.

"German prisoners!" said Janet, and strained her eyes to see, thinking
all the time of a letter she had received that morning from her soldier
brother fighting with the English troops to the west of Rheims:--

"The beggars are on the run! Foch has got them this time. But, oh, Lord,
the sight they've made of all this beautiful country! Trampled, and
ruined, and smashed! all of it. Deliberate loot and malice everywhere,
and tales of things done in the villages that make one see red. We
captured a letter to his wife on a dead German this morning: 'Well, the
offensive is a failure, but we've done one thin