inst the warm
kitchen wall, and heated by the cunning little hot-water pipe her man
had put there in his old handy days. Under it were one little monthly
rose, which still had blossoms, and some straggly small chrysanthemums.
She had been keeping them for the feast when he came home; but if he
wasn't to come, what should she do? She raised herself. Above the wet
roofs sky-rack was passing wild and dark, but in a little cleared space
one or two stars shone the brighter for the blackness below. "I must
look on the bright side," she thought, "or I can't bear myself." And she
went in to cook the porridge for the evening meal.

The winter passed for her in the most dreadful anxiety. "Repatriate the
Huns!" That cry continued to spurt up in her paper like a terrible face
seen in some recurrent nightmare; and each week that she went to visit
Gerhardt brought solid confirmation to her terror. He was taking it
hard, so that sometimes she was afraid that "something" was happening in
him. This was the utmost she went towards defining what doctors might
have diagnosed as incipient softening of the brain. He seemed to dread
the prospect of being sent to his native country.

"I couldn't stick it, Dollee," he would say. "What should I do--whatever
should I do? I haven't a friend. I haven't a spot to go to. I should be
lost. I'm afraid, Dollee. How could you come out there, you and the
children? I couldn't make a living for you. I couldn't make one for
myself now."

And she would say: "Cheer up, old man. Look on the bright side. Think of
the others." For, though those others were not precisely the bright
side, the mental picture of their sufferings, all those poor "princes"
and their families, somehow helped her to bear her own. But he shook
his head:

"No; I should never see you again."

"I'd follow you," she answered. "Never fear, Max, we'd work in the
fields--me and the children. We'd get on somehow. Bear up, my dearie.
It'll soon be over now. I'll stick to you, Max, never you fear. But they
won't send you, they never will."

And then, like a lump of ice pressed on her breast, came the thought:
"But if they do! Auntie! My boy! My girls! However shall I manage if
they do!"

Then long lists began to appear, and in great batches men were shovelled
wholesale back to the country whose speech some of them had well-nigh
forgotten. Little Gerhardt's name had not appeared yet. The lists were
hung up the day after Mrs. Gerhardt's week