"Oh, do you think you'd better?" she hesitated.

"You can come, too, if you're afraid. You've always said you wanted to
die with me."

"Well. But you go first."

He disappeared within, and then came back to the doorway. "Just come in
here, a moment." She found herself in a sort of antechamber, half the
height of her own room, and following his gesture she looked down where
in one corner some crouching monster seemed showing its fiery teeth in a
grin of derision. This grin was the damper of their stove, and this was
where the maid had kindled the fire which had been roasting them alive,
and was still joyously chuckling to itself. "I think that Munich man was
wrong. I don't believe we beat the Germans in anything. There isn't a
hotel in the United States where the stoves have no front doors, and
every one of them has the space of a good-sized flat given up to the
convenience of kindling a fire in it."




L.

After a red sunset of shameless duplicity March was awakened to a rainy
morning by the clinking of cavalry hoofs on the pavement of the
long-irregular square before the hotel, and he hurried out to see the
passing of the soldiers on their way to the manoeuvres. They were troops
of all arms, but mainly infantry, and as they stumped heavily through the
groups of apathetic citizens in their mud-splashed boots, they took the