Mona, who wants to cry out in court, hurries home, and she is there when the guard brings the prisoner back. He looks like a picture of despair—bewildered, distraught and hopeless.
Mona finds it harder than ever after this to listen to her father’s imprecations when somebody tells him of German victories.
“Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered.... Root them out, O Lord, that they be no more a people.”
Sometimes she makes a sort of remonstrance, and then the old man looks up at her and says again:
“What’s come over thee, woman? I don’t know in the world what’s coming over thee.”
Every morning on getting up she looks away over the barbed-wire fence to the open fields beyond where the young men and the girls are working, as Robbie and she used to do in the early dawn at harvest. And every night on going to bed she stares down at the bare, black, cinder-covered encampment lit up from end to end by its fierce white arc-lights. More than ever now she feels like that hairdresser, and wants to escape from the camp. Yet the strange thing is that she knows quite well that even if she could do so she would not.
Oskar Heine has been made a camp captain for good behaviour, and is permitted to move about as he likes, yet they rarely meet and hardly ever speak. But one day he comes alone to the door of the dairy, and holding out something that is in the palm of his hand he says:
“Do you know this?”
It is Robbie’s silver lever watch.
“Where did you get it?”