Henri watched grimly and hummed a little song: 

“Trou la la, ce ne va guere;
Trou la la, ca ne va pas.”

Still humming under his breath, when the peasant left the crossroads he followed him.  Not closely.  The peasant cut across the fields.  Henri followed the road and entered the fields at a different angle.  He knew his way quite well, for he had done the same thing each day for four days.  Only twice he had been a Belgian peasant, and once he was an officer, and once he had been a priest.

Four days he had done this thing, but to-day was different.  To-day there would be something worth while, he fancied.  And he made a mental note that Sara Lee must not be in the little house that night.

When he had got to a canal where the pollard willows were already sending out their tiny red buds, Henri sat down again.  The village lay before him, desolate and ruined, a travesty of homes.  And on a slight rise, but so concealed from him by the willows that only the great wings showed, stood the windmill.

It was the noon respite then, and beyond the line of poplars all was quiet.  The enemy liked time for foods and the Belgians crippled by the loss of that earlier train, were husbanding their ammunition.  Far away a gap in the poplar trees showed a German observation balloon, a tiny dot against the sky.

The man Henri watched went slowly, for he carried a bag of grain on his back.  Henri no longed watched him, He watched the wind wheel.  It had been broken, and one plane was now patched with what looked like a red cloth.  There was a good wind, but clearly the miller was idle that day.  The great wings were not turning.

Henri sat still and smoked.  He thought of many things—­of Sara Lee’s eyes when in the center of the London traffic she had held the dying donkey; of her small and radiant figure at the Savoy; of the morning he had found her at Calais, in the Gare Maritime, quietly unconscious that she had done a courageous thing.  And he thought, too, of the ring and the photograph she carried.  But mostly he remembered the things she had said to him on their last meeting.

Perhaps there came to him his temptation too.  It would be so easy that night, if things went well, to make a brave showing before her, to let her see that these odd jobs he did had their value and their risks.  But he put that from him.  The little house of mercy must be empty that night, for her sake.  He shivered as he remembered the room where she slept, the corner that was shot away and left open to the street.

So he sat and watched.  And at one o’clock the mill wheel began turning.  It was easy to count the revolutions by the red wing.  Nine times it turned, and stopped.  After five minutes or so it turned again, thirty times.  Henri smiled:  an ugly smile.

“A good guess,” he said to himself.  “But it must be more than a guess.”