E-text prepared by Charles Klingman
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By the Same Author
VERSE: African Items
Vrouw Grobelaar's Leading Cases, The Adventures of Miss Gregory,
The Second-class Passenger
NOVELS: Souls in Bondage, Salvator, Margaret Harding
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And Eleven Other Stories
by
Gassell and Company, LTD London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
First Published 1920
To
From the great villa, marble-white amid its yews and cedars, in whichthe invaders had set up their headquarters, the two officers thestout, formidable German captain and the young Austrian lieutenantwent together through the mulberry orchards, where the parched grassunderfoot was tiger-striped with alternate sun and shadow. The hushof the afternoon and the benign tyranny of the North Italian sunsubdued them; they scarcely spoke as they came through the ranks offruit-laden trees to the low embankment where the last houses of thevillage tailed out beside the road.
"So ist's gut!" said Captain Hahn then. "We are on time nicely ontime!" He climbed the grassy bank to the road and paused, his tallyoung companion beside him. "Halt here," he directed; "we shall seeeverything from here."
He suspired exhaustively in the still, strong heat, and tookpossession of the scene with commanding, intolerant eyes. He was aman in the earliest years of middle life, short, naturallyfull-bodied, and already plethoric with undisciplined passions andappetites. His large sanguine face had anger and impatience for anhabitual expression; he carried a thick bamboo cane, with which helashed the air about him in vehement gesticulation as he spoke; allhis appearance and manner were an incarnate ejaculation. Beside him,and by contrast with the violence of his effect, his companion waseclipsed and insignificant, no more than a shape of a silent youngman, slender in his close-fitting grey uniform, with a swart,immobile face intent upon what passed.
It was the hour that should crown recent police activities of CaptainHahn with the arrest of an absconding forced-laborer, who, havingescaped from his slave-gang behind the firing-line on the Piave, hadbeen traced to his father's house in the village. An Italianrenegade, a discovery of Captain Hahn's, had served in the affair; awhole machinery of espionage and secret treachery had been put inmotion; and now Lieutenant Jovannic, of the Austrian Army, w