At the top of the street Jean stopped and went on foot a little way down.
He came back, with the report that new shells had made the way impassable;
and again Sara Lee shivered. If the little house was gone!
But it was there, and lighted too. Through its broken shutters came the
yellow glow of the oil lamp that now hung over the table in the _salle a
manger_.
Whatever Jean's anxieties had been fell from him as he pushed open the
door. Henri's voice was the first thing they heard. He was too much
occupied to notice their approach.
So it was that Sara Lee saw, for the last time, the miller and his son,
Maurice; saw them, but did not know them, for over their heads were bags
of their own sacking, with eyeholes roughly cut in them. Their hands
were bound, and three soldiers were waiting to take them away.
"I have covered your heads," Henri was saying in French, "because it is
not well that our brave Belgians should know that they have been betrayed
by those of their own number."
It was a cold and terrible Henri who spoke.
"Take them away," he said to the waiting men.
A few moments later he turned from the door and heard Sara Lee sobbing
in her room.
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