The Herr Doktor peered towards the place where she was staring, and with eyes which gradually filled with pain and horror, he saw that a thin stream of blood was oozing sluggishly through the doorway where he had stood so often talking to the Frenchwoman, with whom, at last, he had become good friends.
He stumbled forward, full of a dreadful foreboding, and tried to push back the door. But it would only swing forward.
Waving the girl back with a sharp, quick gesture, he pressed through the aperture, and then he, too, uttered an exclamation, a hoarse guttural cry of distress, for just behind the door, huddled up on the floor of her kitchen, lay the dead body of Madame Blanc.
The landlady of the Tournebride had been shot half a dozen times, at close range, in the breast, not struck—as the German surgeon for a brief moment had supposed and hoped—by a stray fragment of shell.
'Ach!' he muttered under his teeth, 'this is bad—very bad!' But Jeanne Rouannès, now standing just behind him, remained silent. She looked as if the tears had frozen on her face, and of the two she was the more composed, as, in silence, they dragged the dead woman a little further into the kitchen, and tried to arrange her poor, fat body into some semblance of decent death.
At last, having done the little they could, they came out again into the sunshine, and crossed once more the courtyard of the ownerless Tournebride. And still, of the two, it was the man who looked, and perchance felt, the more affected. In his companion all sensation seemed dulled, and as they walked along, perforce traversing many painful scenes—for they had now re-entered the zone of looting and disorder—she seemed really unconscious of what was going on about her.
Not till they had wandered for a long way, hither and thither, did they find the headquarters of the Commandant established in the Mairie. It was there that the Herr Doktor listened, with a rush of impotent anger, to the curt intimation that the French Red Cross nurse, instead of receiving a pass out of Valoise, must proceed at once to the German Field Ambulance which was already at work in the church hard by.