It was their last evening together, for Helene and her husband were leaving the following day. As they walked along under the chestnut trees on the Schweizerhof Quai, Niall was dull and silent. She had stirred the very depths of his young, impressionable heart, this girl. He didn't attempt to deceive himself: he knew he was passionately in love with her. He felt that he hated old von Behr. But—it was all so hopeless.

That night he dined with them. The dinner was not a great success. They were all pre-occupied—Helene and Gordon with crowding thoughts that were very much akin, the Count with a disquieting dispatch from the Wilhelmstrasse and a severe attack of indigestion. At ten o'clock he excused himself: he had writing to do. He pointedly suggested that his wife should go to bed; and he made his adieux to Niall, remarking that they were leaving early in the morning and would not likely see him. Furious with stifled anger, the boy said a conventional good-bye to the woman he loved. She moved away. Count von Behr lingered for a moment, and then betook himself with shambling gait to his accustomed corner of the writing-room, which, for some reason, he preferred to his own private apartment.

The moment he was out of sight Niall hurriedly left the lounge and hastened upstairs. On the first floor he saw her, obviously lingering, a little way down the corridor. She came back as she saw him approach. The boy blushed deeply as he took her hand, and stammered something about not being able to say good-bye in such a beastly cold fashion. His head seemed to be swimming. He had some confused impressions about the white of her evening gown and a great crimson rose at her breast.

"My Gordon," she said softly, with that fascinating inability to control her r's that thrilled him; "Whistle me your tune once again—quickly, for I must go. I shall remember you by it, boy. Perhaps, some day if we meet again, I may be able to whistle it to you!"

She smiled, but her eyes were moist. And Niall drew his parched lips together and managed to whistle the strange, mysterious air. He finished and stood awkwardly facing her, tall and distinguished in his evening clothes. No word of love had ever passed between them, but as they looked into each other's eyes, each read the secret that nothing could hide.

"Adieu, my Gordon," she whispered hastily. "You have been good to me. I won't forget you ... and you'll help me often ... but be sensible, boy—and forget me!"

A moment later she was running down the corridor and vanished at the end. The boy stood for a minute or two rigid where he was, staring blankly at a red rose in his hands, his head reeling with the delicious joy of the knowledge that for one never-to-be-forgotten moment her arms had been thrown round his neck, and on his mouth her warm lips had pressed a swift, burning kiss.

II

Captain Gordon Niall of the Uist Highlanders lay flat on his face beside a loophole in the wall. With a subaltern, two men, and a stray sergeant of the Yorkshire Rifles, he occupied the remains of a former farmstead, now a jumbled heap of bricks and mortar. The only portion of this mass of refuse that looked like a house was a right angle formed by the ends of two walls which rose like a skeleton from the shattered piles of rafters, rubbish, stones, lime, and dead bodies of mangled men.

It was one of the supreme moments resultant upon the German break through near Armentières, that grim, bloody month of April, 1918. The British line existed only in the imagination of an exhausted and bewildered Staff, their faculties half paralysed with fatigue and over work. No one knew with anything even approaching certainty what the situation was. Only one thing was certain because it was obvious, and that was that the very existence of our Armies was hanging in the balance. The British front was hopelessly, irretrievably broken; and a disorganised rabble of tattered regiments, half crazy with weariness and strain and hunger, were retreating in mixed, irregular bands back from the river Lys, through a withering hail of bullets and a raging tornado of shrapnel and high explosive; valiantly and uncomplainingly to take up new positions and renew the desperate struggle against overwhelming odds.