given the future, and he was stronger than the artillery. By all the laws, vibrations of fear ought to have passed into the tiny body. His consciousness, it would seem, must be a nest of horrors. Instead of that, his cry had the insistence of health. His solemnity was as abysmal as that of a child of peace. [196] When the girls visited "Pervyse" next morning, the grandmother was nursing him with sugar and water from a quart bottle. She had him dressed in dark blue calico. Thereafter twice a day they called upon him, and each time Hilda carried snowy linen, hoping to win the grandmother. But the old lady was firm, and "Pervyse" was to thrive, looking all the redder, inside blue calico. The mother was a good mother, sweet and constant. Very slowly, the nurses won her confidence and the grandmother's respect. "Do come away," urged Hilda. "Let me take you all back to La Panne, where [197]it is safer. Give 'Pervyse' his chance. It is senseless to live here in this shed under shell fire. Some day, the guns will get you, and then it will be too late." [197] But always they refused, mother, and brother, and big and little sister, and grandmother. The village was their place. The shed was their home. Hilda brought her beautiful big ambulance to their door. There was room enough inside for them all to go together, with their bundles of household goods. And the mother smiled, saying: "The shells will spare me. They will not hurt me." "You refuse me to-day," replied Hilda, "but to-morrow I shall come again to take you away. I will take you to a new, safe home." Very early the next morning, Hilda heard the sick crumble that meant the crunching of one more dwelling. She hurried to the door, and looked down [198]the road. The place of the new birth had tumbled, and a thick smoke was rising from the wreck. She ran faster than she had ever run for her own safety. She came to the little home in a ruin of plaster and glass and brick-dust. Destruction, long overdue, had fallen out of the sunny blue sky on the group of reckless survivors in that doomed village. The soldiers were searching in the smoking litter for bodies. Big sister and little sister and brother were dead, and the little old grandmother. The mother, with shell wounds at her nursing breasts, was dying. Only "Pervyse" was living and to live. By a miracle of selection, he lay in the
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