mitting but little of
the smoky evening sunset. Some soldiers in the hallway outside finally
lighted torches; red reflections danced over the torn ceiling and
plaster-covered floor, illuminating a corner where the Countess was
sitting by the bedside, her head lying on the covers. How long she had
been there I did not know, but when I spoke she raised her head and
answered quietly.

In the torch-light her face was ghastly, her eyes red and dim as she
came over to me and looked out into the darkness.

The woman was shaken terribly, shaken to the very soul. She had not
seen all that I had seen; she had flinched before the spectacle of a
butchery too awful to look upon, but she had seen enough, and she had
heard enough to support or to confound theories formed through a young
girl's brief, passionless, eventless life.

Under the window soldiers began shooting the crippled horses; the
heavy flash and bang of rifles set her trembling again.

Until the firing ceased she stood as though stupefied, scarcely
breathing, her splendid hair glistening like molten copper in the red
torches' glare.

A soldier came into the room and dragged the bedclothes from the bed,
trailing them across the floor behind him as he departed. An officer
holding a lantern peered through the door, his eye-glasses shining,
his boots in his hand.

He evidently had intended to get into the bed, but when his gaze fell
upon us he withdrew in his stockinged feet.

On the stairs soldiers were eating hunches of stale bread and knocking
the necks from wine bottles with their bayonets. One lumpish fellow
came to the door and offered me part of a sausage which he was
devouring, a kindly act that touched me, and I wondered whether the
other prisoners might find among their Uhlan guards the same humanity
that moved this half-famished yokel to offer me the food he was
gnawing.

Soldiers began to come and go in the room; some carried off chairs for
officers below some took the pillows from the bed, one bore away a
desk on his broad shoulders.

The Countess never moved or spoke.

The evening had grown chilly; I was cold to my knees.

A soldier offered to build me a fire in the great stone fireplace
behind me, and when I assented he calmly smashed a chair to
kindling-wood, wrenched off the heavy posts of the bed, and started a
fire which lit up the wrecked room with its crimson glare.

The Countess rose and looked around. The soldier pushed my long chair