of a child. It struck and shook her violently with memory to see them.
"That's why the Germans write good fairy stories!" she thought, and her
eyes passed to the framed photographs that hung near the postcards,
pictures of soldiers in uniform, sitting at a table with the two
daughters of the house. But these wooden faces, these bodies pressing
through unwieldy clothes seemed unrelated to the childish postcards.

She went contentedly to her bed, the room, bare of all her belongings,
except the one bag that stood, filled and open, upon the table; sleeping
for the last time in the strange bed in the strange town which she might
never see again. It was time indeed to go.

For days past civilians had crept through the gates of Metz, leading old
horses, drawing ramshackle carts filled with mattresses, faded silk
chairs, gilt ormolu stands, clocks and cloaks and parrot cages; all the
strange things that men and women use for their lives. The furniture
that had fled in other carts from villages now dust upon a dead plain
was returning through all the roads of France, repacked and dusted, to
set up the spirit of civilian life again.

It was time to go, following all the other birds of passage that war had
dragged through the town of Metz--time to make way for the toiling
civilian with his impedimenta of civilisation.

In the morning when she opened her eyes the room was darker than usual,
and the opening of the window but the merest square of light. Snow was
built up round the frame in thick rolls four inches high.

She dressed hurriedly and rolled up the sleeping-sack with her few last
things inside it. Out in the street the snow was dry and thick and