"Ombos surveyed his coffee with the air of a connoisseur, his head turned on one side.
"Margot produced the bowls of cigarettes and reached over my shoulder to offer me one. 'You want Egyptian?' she said smiling. 'You see I have a good memory--you smoked them last time.'
"A warm faint perfume came from her hair.
"It was ten o'clock when I rose to leave, Ombos and Margot came out to the front to say good night: my last glimpse, as I walked down the _pavé_ street, was of Margot--a bare-headed figure, with wistful grey eyes, calm with the mysterious wisdom of pure womanhood. She waved her dainty lace handkerchief to me.
"That was the last of Ombos in the flesh. The next day, after German shells had poured on Ypres for six hours without cessation, my regiment left the town, and we went out a mile or two to take over some trenches.
"A month later my duty took me back to Ypres, and I found myself walking up the Rue Bar-le-Duc towards the little antique shop. Overhead the shells whistled without cessation. It was now a city of the dead--one could not realize that it was the same pleasant little town where I had met with so strange an experience a few weeks back. Men, children and horses were lying dead in every gutter.
"In due course I arrived at the shop. A large hole had been ripped in the _pavé_ road before the door, and I had to step over a dead and twisted soldier to gain an entrance. Of course the place was empty. Ombos, Albertus Magnus and all the wonderful contents of the spacious old rooms had disappeared. I made a search of the house, and it was not without a curious sensation in my heart that I entered the room where the Master of Masters had towered in his niche. Silence--only the faint boom of a gun far away in the French trenches--awful, ghastly silence. Then a deafening roar and a falling of masonry as Krupp's marked down another house in the town of sorrow. The horror of it!
"I turned dismally away, out into the Rue Bar-le-Duc, and along the square. A few scattered lights shone feebly through the evening mist, and over towards the Norman bridge the yellow flames from a burning house lit up the sky with a lurid glow. At nearly every street corner little groups of civilians had collected and were talking and gesticulating in a terrified manner. When a big shell came with a hoarse, rattling noise through the air, like a racing motor cycle on the track at Brooklands, they would rush into their homes, panic-smitten. If death winked, and passed them over, out they would creep again. And so they lived in an inferno of shells for weeks on end.