"I tell you to go," repeated the Commandant in angry but suppressed voice.
"You can shoot me," said the girl, "but I will not go without you. Come—" her voice turned to pleading—"Come, while there is time."
"My time has come," said the Commandant. "It is here—my end."
"Then for me, too," she said, "but I have come to take you from it."
There was a silence of a few seconds, then the sound of a chair scraping the floor, heavy boots on the boarding, and the two, Commandant and girl, descending the stairs. Unastonished, they stepped out and found the two women waiting.
"We must save the girl," said the Commandant. "Come, run for it, all of you, run!"
He pushed them forward with his hands, and back down the road they had come. He ran and they ran till they reached their dwelling, and entered, and stood at the north window, looking over toward the dim house from which they had escaped. Out from the still night of darkness, came a low thunder from beyond the Yser. In the tick of a pulse-beat, the moaning of a shell throbbed on the air and, with instant vibrancy, the singing string of the piano at their back answered the flight of the shell. And in the same breath, they heard a roar at the railroad, and the crash of timbers. Soft licking flames broke out in the house of the Belgian watchers. Slowly but powerfully, the flames gathered volume, and swept up their separate tongues into one bright blaze, till the house was a bonfire against the heavy sky.