The corporal wheeled abruptly and marched away. He did not again look back at them—at his cousin and the man she loved standing at the cross-roads, hand in hand.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE ESCAPE
There was an explosion. Sanderson urged Belinda on up the dusty road.
"Do not weep for them," he urged, knowing her tender heart was torn by this parting from the cousins. "Believe all will come right in the end. And they are brave boys."
"How do we know we shall ever see them or hear of them again?" she sobbed. "Oh, Frank! this war—this war! And we are in it, too—we Americans! The whole world seems mad!"
"We are in it the sooner to end it, let us hope," he muttered. Then: "The wood yonder is the safest place for us. Let us hurry, dear heart. Renaud will have arranged with the French airmen to drop no bombs there."
They pressed forward, saying little for some time, for their peril was great and fear drove them on. Along the battlefront the great guns volleyed and thundered. It was growing dusk, but the glare from the lines, the flare of bombs and exploding shells, flouted the falling night.
Suddenly, in their rear, a great light burst skyward. The explosion crashed in the ears of the fugitives and Belinda would have fallen had her companion not held her up.
As they looked back the château from which they had so recently escaped, seemed to rise heavenward. The vibration of the disintegrating mass rocked the earth itself.