to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who approves a

pupil's self-correction. 'Yes, that's better.'
How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how

wonderful it all was. This was the brain of the western world,
this was Olympus with the warring earth at its feet. And he was

guiding France, France so long a resentful exile from
imperialism, back to her old predominance.

It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be
privileged to participate....

It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal
devotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact,

punctual. She must control herself....
She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when

the war would be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this
harshness, this armour would be put aside and the gods might

unbend. Her eyelids drooped....
She roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night

outside was no longer still. That there was an excitement down
below on the bridge and a running in the street and a flickering

of searchlights among the clouds from some high place away beyond
the Trocadero. And then the excitement came surging up past her

and invaded the hall within.
One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of

the room, gesticulating and shouting something.
And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn't

understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed
machinery and cables of the ways beneath, were beating--as pulses

beat. And about her blew something like a wind--a wind that was
dismay.

Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child
might look towards its mother.

He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but
that was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand

gauntly gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too
manifestly disposed to drag him towards the great door that

opened on the terrace. And Viard was hurrying towards the huge
windows and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent forward

and with eyes upturned.
Something up there?

And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.
The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against

the masonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping
down through the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two

of them, there had already started curling trails of red....
Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through

moments that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl
down towards her.

She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the
world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening,

all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out
about her and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting

pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly
flight of huge angular sheets of glass. She had an impression of

a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddened living thing
that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst a chaos of

falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earth furiously,
that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing rabbit . . .

She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.
She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that

a little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She
tried to raise herself and found her leg was very painful. She

was not clear whether it was night or day nor where she was; she
made a second effort, wincing and groaning, and turned over and

got into a sitting position and looked about her.
Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of

a vast uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing
had been destroyed.

At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous
experience.

She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world,
a world of heaped broken things. And it was lit--and somehow

this was more familiar to her mind than any other fact about
her--by a flickering, purplish-crimson light. Then close to her,

rising above a confusion of debris, she recognised the Trocadero;
it was changed, something had gone from it, but its outline was

unmistakable. It stood out against a streaming, whirling uprush
of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled Paris and the Seine

and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful, luminous
organisation of the War Control....

She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she
lay, and examined her surroundings with an increasing

understanding....
The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the

river. Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water,
from which these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps

of vapour came into circling existence a foot or so from its
mirror-surface. Near at hand and reflected exactly in the water

was the upper part of a familiar-looking stone pillar. On the
side of her away from the water the heaped ruins rose steeply in

a confused slope up to a glaring crest. Above and reflecting
this glare towered pillowed masses of steam rolling swiftly

upward to the zenith. It was from this crest that the livid glow
that lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind

connected this mound with the vanished buildings of the War
Control.

'Mais!' she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite
motionless for a time, crouching close to the warm earth.

Then presently this dim, broken human thing began to look about
it again. She began to feel the need of fellowship. She wanted

to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate her experience.
And her foot hurt her atrociously. There ought to be an

ambulance. A little gust of querulous criticisms blew across her
mind. This surely was a disaster! Always after a disaster there

should be ambulances and helpers moving about....
She craned her head. There was something there. But everything

was so still!
'Monsieur!' she cried. Her ears, she noted, felt queer, and she

began to suspect that all was not well with them.
It was terriblylonely in this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps

this man--if it was a man, for it was difficult to see--might for
all his stillness be merely insensible. He might have been

stunned....
The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a

moment every little detail was distinct. It was Marshal Dubois.
He was lying against a huge slab of the war map. To it there

stuck and from it there dangled little wooden objects, the
symbols of infantry and cavalry and guns, as they were disposed

upon the frontier. He did not seem to be aware of this at his
back, he had an effect of inattention, not indifferent attention,

but as if he were thinking....
She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was

evident he frowned. He frowned slightly, he had an air of not
wanting to be disturbed. His face still bore that expression of

assured confidence, that conviction that if things were left to
him France might obey in security....

She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer.
A strange surmise made her eyes dilate. With a painful wrench