"A bombardment?" asked Sara Lee.
"From the air. They may pass over, but there are twelve taubes, and they are circling overhead."
The first bomb dropped then in the street. It was white moonlight and the Germans must have seen that there were no troops. Probably it was as Henri said later, that they had learned of the little house, and since it brought such aid and comfort as might be it was to be destroyed.
The house of the mill went with the second bomb. Then followed a deafening uproar as plane after plane dropped its shells on the dead town. Marie and Sara Lee were in the cellar by that time, but the cellar was scarcely safer than the floor above. From a bombardment by shells from guns miles away there was protection. From a bomb dropped from the sky, the floors above were practically useless.
Only Henri and René remained on the street floor. Henri was extinguishing lights. In the passage René stood, not willing to take refuge until Henri, whom he adored, had done so. For a moment the uproar ceased, and in a spirit of bravado René stepped out into the moonlight and made a gesture of derision into the air.
He fell there, struck by a piece of splintered shell.
"Come, René!" Henri called. "The brave are those who live to fight again, not—"
But René's figure against the moonlight was gone. Henri ran to the doorway then and found him lying, his head on the little step where he had been wont to sit and whittle and sing his Tipperaree. He was dead. Henri carried him in and laid him in the little passage, very reverently. Then he went below.
"Where is René?" Sara Lee asked from the darkness.
"A foolish boy," said Henri, a catch in his throat. "He is, I think, watching these fiends of the air, from some shelter."