The Tax-collector shrugs his shoulders as he fingers a cigarette.
“You must remember it is against the rules of warfare for non-combatants to fire,” he murmurs.
“Have they?”
He flicks an infinitesimal spot of dust from the table-cloth, and does not answer me.
Yet if one’s country be invaded who shall say that one may not avail oneself of any means to oust the hated foe?
The nostalgia of war seizes me. I know a country where such things could not be. Shall I ever see England, dear England again? Involuntarily I breathe the words aloud. The Tax-collector leans across to me and speaks firmly but very gently as one would address a tired child, “You will never see England again, never, Mademoiselle. Make up your mind to that.”
I scrape my chair back along the wooden boards and rise in a flurry because “it is so hot, so hot”—and escape to my room to dream of what might have been but never can be now——
SPIES AHOY
Chasse-aux-espions! A governmental order has come through that we are to arrest any suspicious-looking person who passes through the village. We suspect ourselves. We suspect everybody. We are only deterred from action by one thought. The horror of shooting in cold blood a poor, blindfolded, unarmed human thing.
The village is thrilled with excitement this morning. A tourist in tweed suit and knicker-bockers has arrived. He hangs up his soft felt hat in the hall and follows up his breakfast order with comments on the war. He has come from Vielsalm. He has spoken with the Germans. The peasants cluster round him.