aking dressings with a crowd of other
white-fingered women. A cable had come that there was a sudden need
for at least ten thousand bandages. These were not yet for American
soldiers in France, though their turn would come, and their wholesale
need. But as Marie Louise wrought she could imagine the shattered
flesh, the crying nerves of some poor patriot whose gaping wound this
linen pack would smother. And her own nerves cried out in vicarious
crucifixion. At noon she left the factory for a little air and a bite
of lunch.

Nicky Easton appeared out of her list of the buried. She gasped at
sight of him.

"I thought you were dead."

He laughed: "If I am it, thees is my _Doppelgaenger_." And he began to
hum with a grisly smile Schubert's setting to Heine's poem of the man
who met his own ghost and double, aping his love-sorrow outside the
home of his dead sweetheart:

"_Der Mond zeigt mir meine eig'ne Gestalt.
Du Doppelgaenger, du bleicher Geselle!
Was aeffst du nach mein Liebesleid,
Das mich gequaelt auf dieser Stelle
So manche Nacht in alter Zeit._"

Marie Louise was terrified by the harrowing emotions the song always
roused in her, but more by the dreadful sensation of walking that
crowded Avenue with a man humming German at her side.

"Hush! Hush, in Heaven's name!" she pleaded.

He laughed Teutonically, and asked her to lunch with him.

"I have another engagement, and I am late," she said.

"Where are you living?"

She felt inspired to give him a false address. He insisted on walking
with her to the Waldorf, where she said her engagement was.

"You don't ask me where I have been?"

"I was just going to. The last I heard you were in the London Tower or
somewhere. However did you get out?"

"The same way like you ditt. I thought you should choin me therein,
but you also told all you knew and some more yet, yes?"

She saw then that he had turned state's evidence. Perhaps he had
betrayed Sir Joseph. Somehow she found it possible to loathe him
extra. She lacked the strength to deny his odious insinuation about
herself. He went on:

"Now I am in America. I could not dare go to Germany now. But here I
try to gain back my place in _Deutschland_. These English think they
use me for a stool-pitcheon. But they will find out, and when
_Deutschland ist ueber alles--ach, Gott_! You shall help me. We do some
work togedder. I come soon by your