"Where are we now?" Miss Ellis peered through the blurred window of the taxi.

"Oh, it's a part you don't know. You haven't an idea," Singleton began again, "what a triumph it is—this permit. Nobody believed it could be brought off. And you are to see her alone! What do you say to that?" He sat back in the car and looked at Miss Ellis.

"Is it so unusual?"

"Unusual! Bless my soul, it's unheard of! The rule is, either you stand outside a grille and talk through bars, or you sit with a table between you and the pr—the person you've come to see. The warder, or in this case it would be the wardress, stands there, two feet away, hearing every word you say and watching your hands to see that nothing's smuggled."

"They behave like that to prisoners in the first class?"

"If a prisoner is dangerous, she has to be watched, whatever class she's in. As a rule."

"I see. In this case they trust to our honor."

Singleton hesitated.

"A—yes. It'll be an immense relief to her to have some one she can talk to freely. I wouldn't be surprised—you see, she's bottled herself up so long—I wouldn't be surprised if she took you more into her confidence than ever she's done yet. I'd be careful if I were you," he said with unusual earnestness, "very careful not to discourage that confidence."

"I don't think it the least likely she'll take me into her confidence," the girl returned on a note of regret, not daring to admit the thrill that ran through her at thought of being the chosen confidante of a prisoner—a Prisoner of the First Class, above all, of the erring, the wonderful Greta. Nan was the freer to speculate about her now that the pain of cutting the woman out of her heart was eased. To serve one who had been her friend would satisfy every canon. If it satisfied a hitherto unquenched curiosity as well—

"You couldn't make a greater mistake," Singleton was saying with that new earnestness of his, "than to discourage any confidence.

"Oh, I wouldn't, not for the world I wouldn't discourage her."

"Do the other thing," he said impressively in her ear as the car stopped.

"Are we there?" Nan started up in excitement.

"Wait a moment." He let down the window and put his head out to speak to the driver. The car turned in the gray light and went on a few yards.

"Tell her you'll take any message to her friends," Singleton suggested to the girl over his shoulder.

"Her friends?"

He was staring out at glimpses of stone wall. "I should say"—he spoke in his most detached manner—"I should say, you'd have a rather interesting half-hour, particularly if you let her unburden her soul on the subject of her—allies."

The car stopped. Singleton got out, and rang a bell. The car was drawn up close against a massive gray wall. Just beyond was a great iron-studded door. In a moment it opened. A man stood there who looked to the irreverent eye like the jailer in a comic opera—a big, saturnine man with an enlarged waist (or an enlargement where his waist might have been), and round this great girth of his a broad belt with the largest keys hanging to it Nan had ever seen out of a pantomime. She asked afterward if they were real keys. She thought that, like the halberds of the Beefeaters, they must be symbolic, "just to impress on people the degree of the locked-upness they'd got to expect here." As to the jailer himself, he, like his keys, was "too good to be true." He wasn't only like an actor. His forbidding manner, his black-avised scowl, and gruff voice, had for the eyes at the car window exactly the same air of unreality as the keys. To Singleton's horror, she confided presently that it was all she could do not to applaud and call out of the window, "Isn't he doing it well!" with the mental reservation that really he was overdoing it.

The basso profundo with the keys stood frowning at the paper Singleton had presented.

"Is she here?" demanded the jailer.

"Oh, yes, I'm here." Nan nodded and beckoned at him out of the window. He gave her a yet more frightful scowl, and she nearly burst out laughing as Singleton, in the act of helping her out, saw, to his consternation.

The scowling giant showed them into a bare little room with an open fire and a chair in front of a table, where a big book like a ledger lay open. Between table and fire was a telephone; all round the walls were benches; nothing else.

The basso profundo left them there in front of the fire. A warder passed the door with a man in prison clothes who was carrying a bucket. The warder spoke to the man. What he said was not intelligible, but the quality of voice struck the light-minded smile from Nan Ellis's face.

"How he spoke!"

Singleton said he didn't notice anything unusual, but he was rather relieved that she had stopped smiling. When the head jailer came back, he had a wardress in tow. The jailer didn't speak, didn't even look at the two waiting.

"This way," said the woman, and led Miss Ellis briskly down a long stone corridor. Another wardress stood by a door slightly ajar.

"Be quick," she said to some one inside. "I can't wait here all day."

"She speaks just as the warder spoke to the man with the bucket," Nan thought. "Does anybody speak like that to Greta?" They wouldn't do it twice, she decided, even before the reconciling phrase "First-class Prisoner" recurred to her. She imagined Greta turning these wooden women into human beings with a lash of her tongue.

Going up the skeleton stairs Nan broke the echoing silence. "Does Miss—the lady know I'm coming?" she asked in a low voice.

Stolidly pursuing her way, the wardress looked straight in front of her for so long, Nan thought, as she told Napier afterward, that the woman wasn't going to speak at all. But when she had sufficiently marked the fact that she wasn't there to answer questions she said, with that same hard tonelessness, "I don't know who'd tell her." Through more corridors they passed till the wardress stopped just short of an open door and rang a bell. A younger woman of the same type came round a corner.

"Tell ninety-six she's to come down," Nan's guide called out, but she went to meet the other wardress, and the two stood talking a moment. They seemed to resent the visitor's inquiring eyes. "That's where you go," said the older one over her shoulder. Nan found, to her surprise, that the direction was addressed to her, with a curt motion of the head toward the open door. As she entered, the door closed behind her. Nan's heart began to thump. "What if they take me for a prisoner, and no one comes to put them right!" she thought. Her spirits had been steadily sinking ever since she heard the warder speaking to the prisoner with the bucket. Mr. Singleton had been wrong. Even for a prisoner of the first class this was a terrifying place. She remembered something she had read once that a captive in the Tower had said centuries ago, "'T is not the confined air; 't is the Apprehension of the place." It was just that. The atmosphere was thick, choking with apprehension. How long "96" was in coming down! On reflection, it was almost consoling that after that rough message Greta should take her time. Nan rested on the confident faith that, when Greta came, the Apprehension would lessen, if not vanish altogether, vanishing before that dauntless step.

This room was even barer than the other: no fire, no open book, no telephone; only a long, narrow table down the middle, several stout wooden chairs, a window heavily barred, nothing else. Sounds outside came muffled, and the more charged with Apprehension for that. What was happening?

The door opened. A glimpse of the tall wardress shutting herself out and shutting in a squat figure clad in shapeless gray serge garments and a foolish cap.

Greta? That?

The girl held her breath, held all her being back from admitting that the apparition by the door could be—For it wasn't the disfiguring dress alone or chiefly, that in the first instant had paralyzed the visitor's tongue and rooted her where she stood. Greta, yes. And they had clothed her body with ridicule. But what had they done to her spirit? There was a horror about the change that over-topped pity, for that awful first moment, while Greta stood, grotesque, dreadful, not so much looking at the girl as looking through her, looking out of eyes too haunted by other shapes to take in an apparition so insignificant as Nan Ellis. Even when Nan was able to move forward, "O, Greta!" was all she could say, but she held out her two hands.

The changed woman hadn't even one to offer.

"What have you come for?" she said in a queer voice.

"Why, to—to see you."

"To see what I look like. Well, you see."

"O Greta!" The girl shrank as if the other woman had struck her. After a quivering moment she added, "I came to ask if I can do anything."

"Who sent you?"

Nan knew now what was the matter with the voice: it was purged of personality. Greta spoke like the wardresses, in a tone out of which all modulation had gone.

"Nobody sent me," said Nan.

"No, of course not."

"I swear to you, Greta, you're wrong if you think—nobody wanted me to come. I've had to move heaven and earth, I had to beg and beg—"

"Beg who?"

"Why, beg—no, I wasn't to say that. It doesn't matter now. But it's been more difficult than you can think. I gave them no peace. I had to see you."

"Why?"

Nan felt guiltily that Greta had guessed that part of the answer was because of a consuming curiosity. What Greta wouldn't, couldn't, know was the pain and compassion that swept the girl after her first moment of recoil.

"Why?" Nan repeated. "Because of—what used to be." Greta seemed not to hear. The girl was so aware of this that she raised her voice a little and spoke with deliberate distinctness. "I didn't know if you had any one you could depend on."

"You do know. I was fool enough to tell you."

"Only Ernst!"

The fierce instinctive warning in Greta's face against utterance of that name, changed to contempt:

"But they'll have got that out of you before you came here. Much good it will do them." And then she found the strangest ground for triumph. "He can take care of himself. They learned that at Liverpool. And because he can take care of himself he can take care of me. If only"—her voice fell huskily—

"If what!" The girl's self-possession broke. "Oh, you are living on the wildest hopes! You must in a place like this. I can see it's terrible to you to be here! But how terrible is it?" In the silence she collected herself. "No, you mayn't want me to know that. Tell me only what can be done."

Greta walked to the window, a strange shambling gait. She looked out and then turned round, but not to face Nan. The strained eyes went carefully all around the room. As she turned sidewise, the gray light fell more merciless on the ravaged face, above all on that patch of discoloration under each eye; no mere violet shadow such as Nan had seen on the faces of the sleepless or the sick. This was as if a muddy thumb had set a deliberate smudge under each eye, and as if the printing of that broad, brown stain had been done with so ruthless a pressure that it had forced in the lower arc of the socket. The eyes made careful circuit of the room. They inspected the ceiling. They scoured the floor. Then Greta bent down and looked at the under side of the table-top. She looked with absorbed attention at the chair before she sat down in it—all signs of mental aberration in the sight of the speechless girl, just as was the loud, toneless voice in which Greta said:

"I suppose they've sent you to get out of me what they've failed to get."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Oh, you don't know what I mean?"

"Greta! Greta!"—the girl dropped into the chair opposite and leaned across the table,—"if I can put away hard feeling and suspicion, can't you? I don't ask you to be friends outside this place. I don't want that any more. But can't you for this little time we have here together just let me help you if I can?"

"How do you propose to help me?"

"It isn't for me to propose how. I don't know what you need."

Again those eyes made circuit of the room.

"What I need?" the hoarse voice repeated. So humped her figure was that it gave her an air of crouching in the chair. The quick turning of the head (all the rest of the body rigid), to look first over one shoulder, then over the other, had in it, taken with the crouching attitude, something animal-like. But the intensity of that listening was not given to the voices in the corridor. Those voices seemed rather to reassure, almost to soothe; for as they sounded nearer, she repeated quietly, "What I need?" Moreover, she looked at Nan as if she really saw her, as if she remembered who she was. "I sha'n't need anything long."

In the eyes bent on her across the table tears sprang up. "Are you so ill, Greta?"

The woman made no answer. She was listening again. It seemed to be the silence that spoke to her, not voices.

"That's one of the things I thought of," the girl went on. "I might get them to let me bring a doctor."

"It would be a great doctor who should cure my ill!"

The words were despairing enough and spoken faintly, but that touch of the old theatricalism was so much more natural than the hoarse, uncadenced speech alternating with the insane listening to nothing at all, that Nan took heart. "May I say you are ill? May I try—"

Greta shook her head.

"What's the use? I've always known I shouldn't live long. We don't."

For a moment Nan couldn't speak. As to Greta, whatever she had come through, whatever she was going toward, she hadn't got beyond enjoyment of tearing at another's heart-strings on the way.

"You mustn't say, mustn't think, you aren't going to live! You must remember—" Nan longed and didn't dare to quote the precedent of the old father in the Berlin brewery, still watchman of the night, as Singleton had told her. She was the more glad she hadn't ventured to speak of him when she presently found that Greta's "we" linked her to no blood kin. She had sunk down farther in the chair, a huddle of coarse serge and misery, and her hands slipped off her lap and hung at her sides.

"The strain is too great," she said under her breath, speaking the truth at last.

The strain was too great. It had broken the Greta of old days. And just as, after the wreck of some great liner, only trifles are left floating over the grave of the Titan, so the woman's surface theatricalism survived the loss of more considerable things.

"With people like us, our hand is against every man," she declaimed in a husky voice, "and every man's hand is against us."

"That's not true. My hand isn't against you."

"We shall see."

"Indeed we shall!"

Greta had made an effort to pull herself up and face the girl more squarely, as though that call to "see" had imposed some change in the focus of vigilance.

This was not the visit she had been expecting. It had taken her unaware. With a new self-distrust, an unwonted slowness, she was collecting her wits and her physical forces, without for an instant losing sight either of the obvious danger or the possible unique opportunity presented by Nan's coming. To seize the occasion to recover some of her hold over the girl—that could endanger nothing. It might even serve.

"If you must believe," Nan was saying, "that my hand is against you,"—barb-like, the phrase had stuck, quivering,—"you needn't think everybody's hand is."

"With the exception of that one, whose isn't?"

The question was awkward.

"Well, there are your friends." She waited while Greta's eyes arraigned her fiercely. "And there are the people who, from their point of view, owe you so much."

"You mean—" Greta waited warily.

"Those who set you on. The people you've run such awful risks for."

"Oh, the powers in Germany! They'll trouble themselves about me!" Her ghost of a laugh was more horrible than cursing. Some of the dullness went out of Greta's eyes for a moment at sight of the impression she was making on the girl. "You think, if we make a single mis-step, 'They' spare us?" The slack hands came up and met in a hard grip on the bare table-top. "They set us superhuman tasks in the midst of strangers. A woman, set to play a lone hand against overwhelming odds, day in, day out. No let up. One false move,"—the locked fingers parted, the hands were lifted a few inches, and fell heavily on the board,—"you are first suspect. Then you lose your liberty. Then you lose your life."

"No! no!" The fascination of horror that had held the girl broke before that evocation of the final doom. "You mustn't be afraid of that! You mustn't—"

"What do you know about it?"

"I am sure, I am sure—"

She ought to have been satisfied with the degree to which she had wrought upon the girl. But that wasn't Greta's way. It didn't suit her that any knowledge of intended clemency should dull the poignancy of Nan's compassion.

"You think I'm afraid I'll lose my life here! Pfui!" She forced out breath too contemptuous to lend itself to word in that first emission. "It isn't my life these creatures want. I'm no good to them dead. I'm no good to them alive if they had the sense to see." She flung it to the wall over Nan's head.

"Oh, if you knew how you've relieved me! Greta! Greta! I wouldn't let myself be afraid of the worst. And yet, deep down,—since I came into this room—I have been afraid. Thank you, Greta, for taking that horror off my mind."

It wasn't at all what Greta had intended. She looked at the girl.

"A person like me," she said, with an effort at that high air of old,—oh, the piteous travesty!—"a person like me, who is supposed to know too much, if she doesn't pay with her life—it isn't always the fault of the people she works for."

"I don't understand," Nan breathed.

"Probably not. We ourselves don't 'understand' till it's too late. What idea had I, when I began, that every hour of my life I should be saying: 'Is it to-day? Will it be to-morrow I shall go under?' We mostly do go under when we've served our turn."

There was the ghost of the old satisfaction in the marred face as she read in the young one how well the old trick worked. "Be very sure it isn't our enemies we fear most. It's those you call our friends."

"You can't"—Nan gasped—"you can't mean the German authorities who—ask to have these things done?"

"Oh, can't I?" She positively revived before her manifest success. "One of my own friends was let in for an English prison by a German agent acting under orders from the Wilhelmstrasse. My friend hasn't come out. He never will come out. Two others I knew, one a woman, made the mistake of knowing too much, and paid the penalty."

"The penalty!" whispered the other.

"They"—Greta stared in front of her—"they disappeared." Her fixed eyes moved. They came back to Nan. "You imagine my friends were set against a prison wall and had their account settled by an English firing squad? Oh, no! We in the service"—with the old arrogance she threw back her head, crowned by the horrible cap—"we know we have no such need to fear any foreign power as we have to fear our own."

Nan failed lamentably to respond to this form of professional pride. "It's a ghastly trade."

"You don't know what you're talking about," Greta said harshly. "The best brains in Europe are at this work. Ask your friends of the British secret service."

"There's a difference between the secret service and spying."

"Oh, is there! Then it would take a Jesuit to find out and a fool to believe. We are all in the same business. Only the other nations play at it, and we work. No questions with us, no limits. You others, yes, all of you,"—she flung it out,—"you paddle. We? We're up to the eyes!" Her own, marred and mud-stained, were lifted to the opposite wall. "We're over the eyes!" she triumphed. "We hold our breath down there under the surface till we crack our lungs. And smug people judge us! People who have never done even a safe thing to serve their country—they judge us—who face death hour by hour!"

"You don't, Greta, anyway." Nan Ellis had her pride, as it seemed, though its roots were deeper than nationality. "Lucky for you, you're in England!"

"England!" Her face as she turned it away was hideous with hatred.

Nan stood up. "Though you refuse to be, I at least can be glad that in England they don't—"

"Oh, don't they!" She clutched at the edge of the table and leaned across it. "I'll tell you what the English don't do. They don't talk about what they do." As Nan opened her lips, the other raised her voice to the level of a hoarse scream. "But there's a thing they don't understand—your friends the English. They imagine they can wear us out. Hein?" Again she addressed an invisible audience, still believing, as Nan thought, that she was under the ceaseless observation that had turned her wits. "These English! They think they can force a German woman to sell her friends, to give away her country! A German! I tell you"—she staggered to her feet—"these devils can go on as long as ever they like. I don't know why they stopped—"

"Stopped? Stopped what?"

"Torturing me," she said, gutturaling the r's till they sounded like the tearing of a fabric. "'Who is my friend in the War Office?'" The words acted on her swifter than poison, more like the twist of a knife in a wound. She opened her mouth and gasped for air. When it came she cast it back in a cry that wasn't human.

Nan shrank against the wall. A bell clanged.

"'The name of the man in the War Office.' Forty times he asked me that, that devil they sent to tor-r-tur-re me." She was speaking too rapidly to swallow; the saliva gathered in bubbles at the corners of her lips. "Every sort of question! Every sort of trap! Insinuating; gentle; quick, sharp as pistol-shots. Over and over and over and over, till you long to die. Then at last, when he's worn out,—not I! not I!"—she cried to the walls,—"then I'm led away, back to my punishment cell,"—she staggered and caught blindly at the chair back—"and the board bed is soft as a cloud in paradise. Two minutes. The wardress! 'Come, they want you.' I'm taken back. 'The name of your friend in the War Office?' and da capo. You see the plan? Hein? The devils in hell must envy the inventor of that Third Degree."

The thing itself comes out of the Dark Ages, but the phrase was framed in America. Nan had heard it before. This method of procedure was contrary, perhaps is still contrary, to English law; but there was no more doubt that Greta von Schwarzenberg had been subjected to the Third Degree than there was doubt of its fearful effect.

"Surely they know it's possible not to answer," the girl said, bewildered.

"Oh, they know!" Greta had fallen back into that hoarse whisper. "It isn't in nature not to answer some things—to answer something that sounds innocent; that gives you a rest; or to answer something dastardly. Taunts—God! the things they say! Oh, you'd answer some of them as long as you could keep your wits and wag your tongue; and then—" She beckoned. Nan came to her round the table. Greta seized her by the shoulders, and with so fierce a grip the girl, in a new access of horror, tried to draw back. Those big, square fingers held like a vise. Greta bent her trembling, froth-flecked lips to the girl's ear. "They don't let you sleep. That's what does it—if anything will." She did not so much let go her hold as fling Nan from her as she raised her voice to its highest pitch. "Not even that is going to make Greta von Schwarzenberg a tool of the English. Never!" she flung to the right wall. "Never!" she screamed to the left. "Never!" She choked suddenly, fell sidewise against the chair, and dropped heavily to the floor.

Nan ran forward with a cry. The door opened, and a couple of wardresses rushed in.

As they raised Greta up, she pointed down the corridor. "Ha! you see? You see?" The backs of two men were disappearing in the distance.

"You have failed again!" Greta shouted after them. "Always you'll fail!"

The wardresses quickly had her on her feet. They handled her with a respect so scant that Nan broke in:

"Let me, please! Oh, gently!"

"She'll show you the way out." The tall wardress nodded curtly at the other.

Greta shot out a hand and clutched Nan's sleeve. "You wanted to help me? Then find a way to see him. Say as long as it's for him, nothing can break me."

"I'm going to get them to send you a doctor," the girl cried.

"Come." The tall wardress seized the disheveled figure by the other arm.

Greta seemed not to know the horrible cap was falling off. "I'd rather have you, after all, than any doctor." She still maintained that fierce hold on Nan. "Specially now that I know you're as"—that laugh!—"as silly as ever. Oh, why couldn't I be selig, too!" Her drooping lips quivered. She fell to feeble crying. "I wanted the good things. More than any one in this world I wanted—since I was little I've wanted to get away from ugliness and evil. I wanted to be a lady. Ai!" she shrieked. "Damn you!"

The younger wardress had slipped round behind the others. She had thrust a hand in between Nan and Greta and loosened the prisoner's hold by some sly use of pain.

Greta turned on the woman.

"Damn you! you—" words from which Nan fled shuddering along the corridor, a wardress at her heels.