“Elizabeth!” Lucy’s lips could hardly frame the word, as with bewildered gaze she stared into the face so close to hers.

There were the same bright dark eyes, filled with shrewd kindliness, and the smiling, patient mouth. Lucy seized hold of the hands that held her shoulders to make sure she was not dreaming, and the touch of Elizabeth’s thin work-roughened fingers made her presence real. The strangeness of their meeting was for that moment quite forgotten. Lucy felt nothing but an overwhelming relief and joy as her kind old nurse’s arms once more went around her. She was no longer alone with her sad thoughts in the gloomy twilight. Elizabeth, who had loved her and shared her worries for ten years back, who had said good-bye to Bob with tears that day on Governor’s Island, was here to help and comfort her. Lucy forgot Karl’s treachery,^[2] remembering only that Elizabeth had saved Bob from her husband’s hands. How often had both Lucy and her mother longed to tell her of their gratitude! She leaned against Elizabeth’s kind shoulder and shed a few tears of weariness and joy, giving way to her feelings for a brief comforting moment. Then she sat up and wiped her eyes.

“How did you get here, Elizabeth? Oh, if things go on happening this way I won’t be surprised at anything!”

“Many days have I been here, Miss Lucy,” Elizabeth answered, as she too wiped away tears of quiet rejoicing. “Since the Germans hold the town before, was I here, but only to-day have I come to ask if I may help in the hospital.”

“And, Karl—where is he?” Lucy stammered over the question.

“He is with his regiment, not far off.” Lucy thought that Elizabeth hesitated before she added, “I could not follow him, so here I came from Petit-Bois, working with the wounded, when the Germans take ChÂteau-Plessis the first time. Already I saw you once, Miss Lucy, the day of the battle—when you watched the airplanes in the square.”

In a flash Lucy remembered the face among the crowd, and the eyes she had fancied were watching her. “That was it! I saw you, too, Elizabeth. At least I felt sure that some one was looking at me. Why didn’t you let me see you?”

“I thought better not, Miss Lucy. The Germans must keep very quiet while the French and Americans were here.” Elizabeth’s voice shook a little as she spoke, and in spite of herself, Lucy felt an unreasoning pity for her as the little German woman went on, “I thought maybe you learn from Mr. Bob that I was here,—but you have not seen him, no? I saw him once, about a month back.”

The words were on Lucy’s lips to tell Elizabeth of Bob’s visit to ChÂteau-Plessis the day before the town’s capture, but before they were spoken she checked herself. The trust and affection of nearly ten years’ companionship were not ties lightly cast aside, but now, her first childish delight at Elizabeth’s presence over, a barrier rose between them—strong and impassable. Elizabeth was a German, and the wife of a German soldier. Summoning the prudence she had so nearly forgotten, Lucy kept silent, and pressed her lips close together. The vision of the German officer questioning the young Englishman came before her eyes. What might her unconsidered words mean to Bob?

Elizabeth’s expressive face looked both hurt and downcast at Lucy’s sudden silence, of which the meaning was plain enough. But she made no complaint, and, pointing toward Colonel Gordon’s cot, beside which they sat on the floor, said softly, “Your father wakes now, Miss Lucy. Already have I talked with him to-day.”

“Did you stay with him this afternoon, Elizabeth?” asked Lucy, reaching out to clasp her old nurse’s hand in sudden remorse at her own suspicion. For had not Elizabeth saved Bob’s life?

“Yes,” Elizabeth nodded. “I stay with him a little while.” She rose to her feet, looking toward the cot where the wounded officer had begun to stir in waking. “I leave you with him now,” she said, and with a lingering glance at Lucy from her brown eyes, went quietly out of the room.

Lucy turned eagerly to her father, hardly waiting for him to open his eyes before she exclaimed, “Oh, Father, I’ve seen Elizabeth, and she said she had talked to you! Isn’t it wonderful to find her here?”

Colonel Gordon smiled, settling his big, lean shoulders among the pillows as he gave an understanding nod to his daughter’s quick words. But Lucy had paused suddenly in her outburst of joy over Elizabeth’s presence. She remembered Miss Pearse’s warning, and with a pang of fear lest some unconsidered word escape her, realized that her father was still ignorant of the town’s capture. Unless Elizabeth——But her father’s first words put her mind at rest on that score.

“I saw her for only a minute after I woke up,” he said, turning on his side with a slight painful effort, to look into Lucy’s face. “But that was long enough to thank her for what she did last year. She told me that she had been allowed to help in the hospital, and that she hoped to see you. How she got here I can’t imagine, nor why they trust her to work among the wounded—though we both know there couldn’t be found a better nurse.”

Lucy was silent, afraid to answer, since she could not tell the truth—that Elizabeth was trusted because the hospital was in the hands of her compatriots. Colonel Gordon did not notice her confusion as he continued earnestly:

“I’m very glad she’s here—however she came—for your sake, Lucy. She is devoted to you, beyond all doubt, and I won’t be quite so uneasy with her here to look after you. Greyson seems almighty slow about getting you off to Calais. I suppose he can’t help it. I can imagine what the state of transportation is, but surely you won’t have to stay much longer. Of course, if it were possible to get right on, your mother and Henry would have been here long ago.”

He paused, breathing a little hard, and frowning, unreconciled, as he silently considered the obstacles to Lucy’s departure.

Lucy sat wretchedly silent, knowing the truth to be a hundred times worse than what already greatly troubled him. In a moment he found breath to speak again.

“Lucy,” he said thoughtfully, “I said I knew Elizabeth was devoted to you, and so she is. But don’t forget for a moment, however kindly we feel toward her, that her country is our enemy. We have good proof that she would not harm Bob, even at Karl’s command, but that is a personal affection with her. It does not mean she would not harm the Allies’ cause. You must be on the watch lest you speak a word that might be repeated to the enemy’s advantage.”

Lucy murmured her agreement as her father, his emphatic tone changing to one of wonder, said again, “Why they allow her to work here I can’t imagine. I must ask Greyson.”

“You’re tired, Father,” said Lucy, getting up after a moment from the floor beside the cot, as Colonel Gordon lay wearily back after his prolonged talk. Her voice shook a little with threatening tears, for it seemed dreadful to her that he should not know the truth, and that she should help to deceive him, though common sense told her it was wise and necessary. He would certainly sleep more peacefully that night thinking the Allies in possession of the town. But it was a deception which could not be kept up much longer.

She bade him good-night with a brave attempt at cheerfulness, and went out into the big ward, which was just dimmed by approaching twilight. Elizabeth was carrying a heavy basket of Red Cross supplies across the hall to the storeroom, and Lucy, without asking permission, ran up to her and seized one of the straw handles, taking half the weight on her own arm. “Go on; I’m going to help,” she said briefly. Elizabeth obeyed, glancing back with troubled solicitude at the serious, determined face of the little girl she knew so well, while Lucy, with that familiar figure before her, bringing swift memories of happy days at home, looked down the rows of wounded men and wondered again if this could all be real.

That night, in spite of the welcome silence of the guns, Lucy’s natural fear and dread at the strange fate that had befallen her brought wakefulness and feverish dreams. But she was too worn out to lie awake long, and Miss Pearse’s footsteps, moving about in the gray dawn, roused her from deep sleep. She struggled at that moment with desperate drowsiness, intensified by the longing to fall back where the bitter truth could be forgotten. But she fought hard against her weakness and, fearful of yielding, sprang out of bed and plunged her face into cold water. Her sleepy eyes blinked stupidly back at her from the shadowy mirror as she vigorously rubbed away the drops, but her resolution was triumphant. To-day she meant to work, that by nightfall she might feel the satisfaction of having done what she could to help—the only thing that was worth doing here.

The guns had commenced again with intermittent bursts of firing, but they were not so close now, and the vibration of the air not so terrific. The Allied guns were turned toward ChÂteau-Plessis since the capture, and the German batteries had found new emplacement outside the town’s western edge; the edge nearest to the railways and the channel. Lucy looked from the window toward the eastern sky, where the clouds were gleaming with a soft, pearly light. There were no bursting shells to mar the sunrise to-day. All was quiet on this side now. She glanced down at the street, along which a dozen German soldiers were strolling. A few shouted words reached her ears, and once more she wished with all her heart she did not understand that language of which every word had grown hateful. Then suddenly she remembered Captain Beattie and the possibility of help to him which that knowledge had put into her hands. It would give her glorious satisfaction to bring the enemy’s own tongue to use against them. She had first, though, to learn the whereabouts of the old prison to which he had been taken.

She quickly finished dressing and joined the two nurses, who saw her with surprise and a little protest on Miss Pearse’s part against her early rising. She did not scold much though, and seemed glad of the promise of Lucy’s help. “I’ll give you work to do the minute you are ready for it,” she said in answer to Lucy’s eager demand, as they crossed the street and climbed the hospital steps under the inspection of the gray-uniformed sentry. “Go in and speak to your father first, and then we’ll see.”

Lucy entered the little room softly, mindful of the other wounded officers as well as of her father, and found Colonel Gordon awake, with eyes turned toward the door. He looked rested and stronger with the improvement each day now brought, but his lips were firmly set, as Lucy had often seen them when he was thinking out a hard piece of work, and his smile was but a faint one as he greeted her.

“Did you sleep well, Father? Are you all right?” she asked, stammering a little because she hated to remember the unhappy secret between them.

Colonel Gordon’s keen, far-seeing eyes studied her flushed and anxious face as he answered quietly, “Yes, I’m all right, little girl. You may drop the camouflage now. I know we’ve lost the town.”

“Oh, Father, who told you? I didn’t,” cried Lucy, dropping down beside him, a great rush of relief overpowering all her fears. He knew the worst and they could share it together, and he had borne the news with his old, unshakable courage. Lucy thought of what Bob had said more than four years ago at Fort Douglas, when the Mexican rebels rose over night, threatening the border. “Father may get excited if breakfast is late, but when anything is really wrong, he’s all right.”

“Greyson told me,” said Colonel Gordon. “I suppose he thought I should guess it anyhow, when I began asking him about Elizabeth. Funny idea—not letting me know.” He spoke with a faint scorn for the ways of the Medical Corps, forgetting, as a man on the road to recovery is apt to do, how ill he had been only a few days before.

“I wondered what in thunder was the matter that they couldn’t get you off,” he went on. “Poor little daughter—it’s pretty tough luck.” His face was drawn with anxiety as he reached out a hand and caught hers in a strong clasp, but she broke in eagerly:

“I’m all right, Father! Please don’t feel so worried. I’m working in the hospital, and, honestly, you don’t know how glad and proud I am—now the scary part is getting better—that I can be of use here.”

“It can’t be helped,” was her father’s slow and almost unheeding answer. “Greyson tells me the enemy has left the hospital pretty much in our own hands. They are rather too tired to bother us,” he said, a flash of satisfaction lighting his face. “I know that much from the action in which I was hit. Their advance is made with a desperately driven force that leaves them limp and done for when it is over. A couple of million Americans will turn the great tide. Long before that time our counter-attack should free the town—but meanwhile, you poor little girl, you’re in the German lines.”

“I’m quite used to it now!” Lucy insisted, not realizing the absurdity of her words in her longing to reassure her father’s keenly suffering mind. “And Elizabeth is here, you know—she will take care of me.”

“Yes—how thankful I am for that,” said Colonel Gordon quickly.

“Here comes Major Greyson, so I’ll leave you,” said Lucy, rising from her place as the surgeon entered for his morning visit. “I’ll go and get my breakfast.”

In the little dining-room she found Elizabeth setting the table with plates and spoons. The sight was such a reminder of breakfast-time on Governor’s Island that, forgetting all her repugnance to Elizabeth’s German sympathies, she threw her arms around her old nurse’s thin, little shoulders, and gave her a hug for a morning greeting. Elizabeth turned a delighted face toward her, exclaiming:

“Good-morning, dear Miss Lucy! How early you are up! Come, in this chair sit, and I will get you the best I can.”

It seemed very pleasant to sit down and be waited on by Elizabeth’s deft fingers, but the strangeness of her being there had not yet passed from Lucy’s mind and she said, wistfully, “Oh, Elizabeth, if we were only back at home. Father and Mother and Bob and William and you and I. Wouldn’t it be great?”

“That will come again, Miss Lucy,” suggested Elizabeth hopefully. But Lucy, unable to say frankly, “Not while there are enough Germans left alive to fight,” lifted a spoonful of weak cocoa to her lips in silence.

“And William—how he is?” asked Elizabeth, stopping her work to make the inquiry with eager affection in her eyes.

“He is well, and, thank goodness, safe at home,” sighed Lucy, seeing again before her the forlorn, stumbling little children of the refugees from ChÂteau-Plessis.

Miss Pearse came in presently and joined her, famished after an hour’s hard work. “I have a job all ready for you, Lucy,” she said, when she had taken a sip of hot coffee and eaten a piece of black bread. “It is a tiresome one, but very necessary.”

“I’ll do anything,” said Lucy quickly.

“Our hospital garments are falling into rags, and no one has any time to mend them. Elizabeth has been helping, but I am going to send her for MÈre Breton’s supplies this morning while you stay here and sew in her stead.”

Miss Pearse had heard all about Lucy’s adventure of the day before, and did not wish her sent on the same errand again, until the Germans should have their own interpreters, or officers who spoke the barbarous English tongue. In any case, Elizabeth could serve their purpose. Lucy had also told Miss Pearse of the years the German woman had spent with the Gordon family, and of the never-to-be-forgotten service she had rendered them. Miss Pearse had shown both interest and sympathy, wondering much, like Lucy, at the strange chance of war which had brought these two old friends together, on such hard terms for friendship. Like Colonel Gordon, she warned Lucy repeatedly against speaking unguardedly before her old nurse. “She is the most German person I ever saw,” she said with conviction. “She has all their good qualities, so I shouldn’t be surprised if she had some of their bad ones. Anyway, you may be sure her husband could make her try to worm out information about the troops. You don’t know what trifling little facts they can make use of. Don’t answer any questions about what troops were in the town, or anything like that.”

“She hasn’t asked me any,” said Lucy. “She has been here herself since the last German occupation, anyhow. But I’ll be careful.”

She was thinking over these warnings as she sat, half an hour later, by the narrow windows of the nurses’ room, mending long rips and tears in pillow-cases and pajamas. Outside the window the German sentry paced the little garden by the budding rose-bushes and crumbling walls, and within the hospital the workers continued their never-ending task. While she meditated, Elizabeth came out from the side door into the garden, carrying two baskets on her arms, and with a nod to the sentry passed quickly out through the ruined gate.

She could have obtained BrÊlet’s company and assistance, but she had started off alone with her big baskets. Lucy, as she looked after her, thought she guessed why. The little German woman suspected that the poilu would have gone with her most unwillingly.

Outside the gate Elizabeth turned east through the same deserted streets which led toward the cottages in the lanes and to the meadows beyond the town. She walked quickly, for the supplies were urgently needed. Besides, she had worked so hard all her life that active occupation had become second nature to her. Bob had once said, “Elizabeth never sits down to rest—only to work more easily that way.” She found a path among the broken stone with patient care, for her shoes were old and gave little protection to her feet. Once she stopped to exchange a word with a German sentry during a lull in the firing. When she neared the edge of the town she was challenged by the guard in front of the Headquarters building, but her German tongue and written permission won her ready passage. At the border of the meadow stood a little improvised shack, put up to accommodate a guard and a field telephone, in case of any alarm from this side of the town. In front of it a corporal was idly walking about, stopping to stare at Elizabeth as she hurried by. She called out a good-morning to him, which he answered with the inquiry:

“Where are you going, Frau, to fill those big baskets?”

Elizabeth nodded over toward MÈre Breton’s cottage, hidden behind its little grove of apple and plum trees, of which many were reduced to blackened and leafless trunks. The cottage itself had been twice struck, but the sturdy old Frenchwoman refused to abandon it, and in the deadly rain and thunder of bursting shells had gone on cultivating her garden, and coaxing her frightened hens to eat and fatten for the wounded poilus in the hospitals. Now she feared they would nearly all go down German throats, but Lucy had the day before tried her best, in her halting French, to convince MÈre Breton that only by feeding the Boches could their own people expect a share.

Elizabeth looked up at the blue, cloud-flecked sky, away from the shattered trees of the wood in front, as she crossed the meadow. Her eyes, always anxious and watchful these days, felt a relief in turning from the scarred earth to the untroubled heavens. But this war is not only on the earth, as she realized with a swift start, when out from behind the clouds darted two flying specks which hung poised above the meadow, the sun just touching their tiny wings. She hurried on, reached MÈre Breton’s house, and found the old woman in the garden among her cabbages. Elizabeth did not know a word of French, but she held out the hospital baskets with a pleasant nod and smile to cover the deficiency of language. MÈre Breton’s sharp blue eyes, from beneath her white cap, gave the German woman a look of bitter hostility, quite untouched by the smile, which faded from Elizabeth’s lips unanswered. MÈre Breton took the baskets, trudged off to fill them, and presently returned them in silence. Her thoughts were as plain as though she had spoken. She knew that not an egg nor a fowl would go to her poilus with a Boche for messenger. Elizabeth nodded good-bye without attempting any further friendly advances, and started on her hot walk back, this time weighed down with a heavy load. She looked quickly up at the sky again as she came out from beneath the trees, for the noise of an airplane was now distinctly heard as it circled not more than half a mile above her head. As she stared up, squinting in the sunlight, the machine dived suddenly and flew around the meadow, hardly two hundred yards above the earth.

Elizabeth stood paralyzed between an impulse to drop down upon the grass and another to run for shelter. At the observation post behind her the corporal had rushed inside to the telephone. No batteries were stationed at this point, for the Germans counted on the Allies not caring to drop bombs on ChÂteau-Plessis, but a telephone call could bring anti-aircraft guns to bear on intruding planes from the north of the town. While Elizabeth stood frozen to the spot, the airplane above her, as though scorning to recognize the fact that ChÂteau-Plessis was in German hands, flew over her so close that she could see the glistening paint of the American emblems on its wings and tail, and the pilot, sitting alone in his little monoplane, leaned over the side and looked at her.

Elizabeth let fall her baskets, heedless, she who was always so careful, of the fragile provisions within. The face looking down with eager eyes from a hundred feet above her was Bob Gordon’s. He reached toward his feet, and, through the roaring of the propeller, Elizabeth heard a wild shout of warning directed to her from the observation post behind. But no bomb was flung from the plane which had her at its mercy. Instead she was suddenly enveloped in a shower of papers fluttering down toward the grass from the pilot’s hand. As she brushed them dazedly from her shoulders, Bob leaned out once more and threw a last paper, only this one was crushed into a ball with a hasty pressure of his fingers. Then the anti-aircraft guns crashed out, and the Nieuport rose like a bird and winged its way toward the sun, dropping another shower of papers as it mounted, which scattered over the green, daisy-starred surface of the field. The balls whistled through the air, but before any accurate shot was possible, the daring little scout had disappeared behind a drifting cloud beyond the reach of fire.

Elizabeth had picked up the ball of paper as soon as it touched the grass. With trembling hands, while she watched the Nieuport make its swift escape, she smoothed out the wrinkled sheet and held it against the sunlight.

“What’s that you have there, Donnerwetter!” asked an angry voice behind her, and the corporal, red-faced and panting, looked over her shoulder, then stooped to pick up another of the leaflets.

“Some more of President Wilson’s talk,” said Elizabeth, still looking with a critical air at the printed sheet before her. “But Himmel!” she added, turning to the corporal with an anxious shake of the head. “For a moment I thought I was done for. I did not know what to do!”

“It was no time to stand staring, like a dummy,” was the corporal’s comment. “Come, Frau, help me gather up this trash, and I’ll burn it and give the impertinent Yankee that for his pains.”

Elizabeth nodded, leaning down to pick up the papers thickly scattered over the grass. Her heart was beating so hard she could hardly conceal her hurried breathing, in spite of her calm and docile exterior as she obeyed the corporal’s orders. She gathered up the crumpled sheet together with the others, crumpling them all into a wad before handing them to her companion. She had seen all she wanted in those two or three minutes while she held the paper against the sunlight. The printed leaves were copies in English and German of a part of President Wilson’s speech made in New York on the 18th of May. But the paragraph that Elizabeth read had been pricked with pinholes^[3] before it was dropped at her feet. It was as follows:

There are two duties with which we are face to face. The first duty is to win the war. And the second duty, that goes hand in hand with it, is to win it greatly and worthily, showing the real quality of our power not only, but the real quality of our purpose and of ourselves. Of course, the first duty, the duty that we must keep in the foreground of our thought until it is accomplished, is to win the war. I have heard gentlemen recently say that we must get five million men ready. Why limit it to five million?

Against the glowing sunlight Elizabeth read Bob’s message: “I shall try to land to-night.”

Back in the hospital Lucy worked hard at the big pile of garments with their long, ragged tears. Her neck ached and her fingers, after two hours, but she kept steadily at it, with the satisfying sense of being one of the hospital workers; of doing, right where the product of her hands was so urgently needed, what she had often done from far away. When the morning was half over Elizabeth came back through the garden, walking slowly with her loaded baskets, and presently she came empty-handed into the room where Lucy was.

“Hello, Elizabeth!” exclaimed Lucy, tired of her own thoughts and welcoming her old nurse with a smile. “Are you coming to sew with me? I’d love some one to talk to.”

“Yes, for a few minutes I help you,” said Elizabeth in a quick, earnest voice that made Lucy look up at her curiously as she continued. “Because I something have to tell you that no one must hear, so I sit by you and softly speak.”

Always when Elizabeth was excited her English grew worse, and now Lucy, astonished at her words and manner, stopped sewing and asked hurriedly, “What is it, Elizabeth? Oh, tell me quickly—there’s nobody to hear.”

Not convinced of this, Elizabeth gave a sharp glance outside the open door and, taking a torn garment on her lap, drew her chair close to Lucy’s by the window before she answered. “I have Mr. Bob seen, and he gave me a message.”

“Bob!” gasped Lucy, her terrified eyes devouring Elizabeth’s face. “Oh, what is he doing here!”

“He is not here now,” said Elizabeth quickly. “He has got safe away.” With her needle poised between her fingers while she forgot all pretense of sewing, she told Lucy in a voice just above a whisper of her morning’s adventure.

Lucy heard her in stupefied silence, only her glowing cheeks and shining eyes giving sign of her overpowering excitement. Other feelings, too, beside joy at this news of her brother, showed in her face. A puzzled wonder was strongest, with the realization of her old nurse’s German sympathies. When Elizabeth came to the part of her story where Bob contrived to drop his message and she to decipher it, Lucy could contain herself no longer.

“But how did you know there was a message hidden there? How could Bob know you would find it?” she burst out, speaking but a part of her confused thoughts aloud.

For answer Elizabeth first looked earnestly into her face, as though she read clearly what Lucy would not say—that she wondered greatly at Bob’s trust in her—then putting down her needle clasped her thin hands anxiously together. “Miss Lucy,” she said a little shakily, “I hope you believe me, because I nothing tell you but the truth. Did I not tell you I saw Mr. Bob here a month ago, when the Allies take the town? At that time we talk, and Mr. Bob explain to me a way that he could a message send, if he needs. He have the charge to let fall those papers—you know—with speeches of the president, over the German lines. He show me how with a pin he could a message make that no one would see, if they had no thought for it. When he said this he spoke of war news only—of course he not think then that you be left here if the Germans take the town.”

“But, Elizabeth,” Lucy stammered, more at sea than ever, “he arranged a cipher with you? He spoke to you of war news?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth nodded. “I know what you would say, Miss Lucy. You wonder that he tell me, but it was first me who tell him something.” Elizabeth’s dark eyes were filled with pain and sorrow as she looked into Lucy’s face and whispered, “No longer do I wish for Germany to win.”

Never in ten long years had Lucy doubted Elizabeth’s word, but now a wretched fear shot through her. Did she dare trust blindly to Karl’s wife? But even while she hesitated, the kind, steady, honest gaze of those dark eyes swept her last doubts away. With impetuous remorse and thanksgiving she reached out her hands and clasped Elizabeth’s closely, while her tongue struggled for words to express her new-born joy and confidence.

“Oh, Elizabeth, I’m glad! I’m so glad!” was all she said, but her face spoke for her, and Elizabeth’s anxious eyes shone with relief and friendliness.

“You believe me, dear Miss Lucy—you know I speak truth?” she asked eagerly. Then at Lucy’s swift assent she continued earnestly, “I tell you all the truth, and then you see I do not deceive you. Miss Lucy, I do not love France or England, or even America better than my Fatherland. Germany I love, and always will I love her. Only, Miss Lucy, now is no longer with us the dear country I before knew.”

A look of horror flashed into her kind face as she said heavily:

“I have things seen that never could I tell you of. At first I believe my countrymen who say the English prisoners are guilty of crimes—for I never any Englishmen knew. I think perhaps they deserve the deadly punishment. But when America send her soldiers against us——” Elizabeth’s voice trembled. “When Mr. Bob so nearly was given up to death; when they tell me lies of how the Americans, they are worse than any—I believe them not! Too long was I in America to be so fooled, and now I know it is a cruel war that has brought her against us. For those men who have put the world on fire, who have made to die those many innocent children—oh, Miss Lucy, better they are beat and conquered by America, and so may God let the old Germany live again!”

The little German woman’s low, cautious voice shook with earnestness. Her clasped hands opened and closed in quick, restless gestures so unlike quiet, steady Elizabeth that Lucy’s heart beat with pity and understanding. In Elizabeth’s simple nature love of country was very strong, and her disillusionment, at returning to war-time Germany, very bitter. Yet she still found courage to hope for better things. Lucy marveled at her patient faith, but she could not at all put her thoughts into words, nor indeed find thoughts that would not hurt more than console, so after a look of warm affection she sat silent. But in a moment curiosity prompted her to ask:

“How about Karl, Elizabeth? Does he know how you feel?”

A shadow settled once more on Elizabeth’s face, but she answered quietly, “Karl is very angry with me, Miss Lucy; but it is not that he knows I would help the Allies now.”

“Then why is he angry?” But even as Lucy asked the question she knew the answer. “Is it because of Bob?” she faltered, and, seeing she had guessed, Elizabeth nodded.

“Somehow, Karl find out that it is my fault Mr. Bob was not taken as a spy. Not yet will he forgive it, but I not think he feel so always; and still if he need me I go to him.”

“Where is he now?” asked Lucy, thinking how little Karl deserved such faithfulness and ashamed that she had ever wondered at Bob’s trusting Elizabeth so entirely.

“He is in Brussels—cook in a hospital. He is safe, Miss Lucy. I not think I could work to help America to win if Karl was in the trenches.”

Lucy had no sympathy for this feeling, but she dimly understood it.

Another desire had grown stronger than all else in her mind now; the wish to make sure of reaching Bob’s rendezvous. The great meadows behind the town were his only possible landing-place, but they were more than a mile away, and sentries were on guard all night in the town.

“Oh, Elizabeth, how shall we ever manage to get there to-night?” she questioned, in a torment of anxiety.

Elizabeth gave her a funny little smile—half-ashamed and yet resolute. “You have forgot, Miss Lucy, that I am a German. Almost where I like can I go, since the town is taken.”