“Come on,” he said in a strong voice.  “If there’s a habitation in this place fit for you I’ll find it.”  John had resumed command, but Julie walked at his elbow, a brave and strong lieutenant.  The two Picards followed close behind.  Suzanne, at this moment, when the resources of Scott were needed so much, had relaxed somewhat of her grimness.  She and Antoine said nothing as they bent their heads to the snow.  Unconsciously they had resigned decision and leadership to the young pair who walked before them.

John glanced toward the river and the plain beyond, but he merely looked into a wall, cold, white and impenetrable.  No ray of light or life came from it.  The hospital camp had been blotted out completely.  But from the north came a faint sullen note, and he knew that it was the throb of a great gun.  Julie heard it too.

“They’re still firing,” she said.

“Yes, but it may not be snowing so hard a few miles away from here.  I discovered when I was up in the air with Philip that the air moves in eddies and gusts and currents like the ocean, and that it has bays and straits, and this may be a narrow strait of snow that envelops us here.  Hear that!  Guns to the south, too!  One side is shelling the other’s trenches.  You remember how it was in all the long fighting that we call the Battle of the Marne.  Day and night, night and day the guns thundered and crashed.  I seemed when I slept to hear ’em in my dreams.  They never stopped.”

“It makes me, too, think of that time, Mr. Scott, except that this is winter and that was summer.  The cloud of battle is just the same.”

“But the results are much less.  It’s a deadlock, and has been a deadlock for months.  I don’t expect anything decisive until spring, and maybe not then.  Here is a good house, Miss Julie.  It looks as if the mayor, or Chastel’s banker might have lived here.  Suppose we try it.”

But the house had been stripped.  All the rooms were cold and bare, and in the rear a huge shell had exploded leaving yawning gaps in the walls, through which the snow was driving fast.  Julie shivered.

“Let’s go away from it,” she said.  “I couldn’t sleep in this house.  It’s continually talking to us in a language I don’t like to hear.”

“I don’t hear its talk,” said John, “but I see its ghosts walking, and I’m as anxious to get away from it as you are.”

Nor were Antoine and Suzanne reluctant, and they hurried out to enter another house which had suffered a similar fate.  They passed through a half-dozen, all torn and shattered by monster shells, and at last they came to one which had before it a stretch of grass, a pebbled walk, a fountain, now dry, and benches painted green, under their covering of snow.

“An inn!” said John.  “This is surely Chastel’s hotel.  Either the de l’Europe, the Grand or the Hollande, because more than half the hotels in Europe bear one or the other of those names.  Is it not fitting, Miss Julie, that we should enter and take our rest in an inn?”