All that morning American infantry had been passing through Delle over the Belfort road. The sun of noon saw no end to them.
The endless column of shadows, keeping pace with them, lengthened with the afternoon along their lengthening line.
Now and then John Recklow opened the heavy wooden door in his garden wall and watched them until duty called him to his telephone or to his room where maps and papers littered the long table. But he always returned to the door in the garden wall when duty permitted and leaned at ease there, smoking his pipe, keen-eyed, impassive, gazing on the unbroken line of young men--men of his own race, sun-scorched, dusty, swinging along the Belfort road, their right elbows brushing Switzerland, their high sun-reddened pillar of dust drifting almost into Germany, and their heavy tread thundering through that artery of France like the prophetic pulse of victory.
A rich September sunset light streamed over them; like a moving shaft of divine fire the ruddy dust marched with them upon their right hand; legions of avenging shadows led them forward where, for nearly half a century beyond the barriers of purple hills, naked and shackled, the martyr-daughters of the Motherland stood waiting--Alsace and Lorraine.
"We are on our way!" laughed the Yankee bugles.
The Fortress of Metz growled "Nein!"
Recklow went back to his telephone. For a long while he remained there very busy with Belfort and Verdun. When again he returned to the green door in his garden wall, the Yankee infantry had passed; and of their passing there remained no trace save for the smouldering pillar of fire towering now higher than the eastern horizon and leagthened to a wall that ran away into the north as far as the eye could see.
His cats had come out into the garden for "the cats' hour"--that mysterious compromise between day and evening when all things feline awake and stretch and wander or sit motionless, alert, listening to occult things. And in the enchantment of that lovely liaison which links day and night--when the gold and rose soften to mauve as the first star is born--John Recklow raised his quiet eyes and saw two dead souls come into his garden by the little door in the wall.
"Is it you, Kay McKay?" he said at last.
But the shock of the encounter still fettered him so that he walked very slowly to the woman who was now moving toward him across the grass.
"Evelyn Erith," he said, taking her thin hands in his own, which were trembling now.
"It's a year," he complained unsteadily.
"More than a year," said McKay in his dead voice.