have me. They will take me away from you all. Already the papers have:
'Intern all the Huns.'" He sat down at the kitchen table and buried his
face in hands still grimy from his leather work. Mrs. Gerhardt stood
beside him, her eyes unnaturally big.

"But Max," she said, "what has it to do with you? You couldn't help it.
Max!"

Gerhardt looked up, his white face, broad in the brow and tapering to a
thin chin, seemed all distraught.

"What do they care for that? Is my name Max Gerhardt? What do they care
if I hate the war? I am a German. That's enough. You will see."

"Oh!" murmured Mrs. Gerhardt, "they won't be so unjust."

Gerhardt reached up and caught her chin in his hand, and for a moment
those two pairs of eyes gazed, straining, into each other. Then he said:

"I don't want to be taken, Dollee. What shall I do away from you and the
children? I don't want to be taken, Dollee."

Mrs. Gerhardt, with a feeling of terror and a cheerful smile, answered:

"You mustn't go fancyin' things, Max. I'll make you a nice cup of tea.
Cheer up, old man! Look on the bright side!"

But Gerhardt lapsed into the silence which of late she had begun to
dread.

That night some shop windows were broken, some German names effaced. The
Gerhardts had no shop, no name painted up, and they escaped. In Press
and Parliament the cry against "the Huns in our midst" rose with a fresh
fury; but for the Gerhardts the face of Fate was withdrawn. Gerhardt
went to his work as usual, and their laborious and quiet existence
remained undisturbed; nor could Mrs. Gerhardt tell whether her man's
ever-deepening silence was due to his "fancying things" or to the
demeanour of his neighbours and fellow workmen. One would have said that
he, like the derelict aunt, was deaf, so difficult to converse with had
he become. His length of sojourn in England and his value to his
employers, for he had real skill, had saved him for the time being; but,
behind the screen, Fate twitched her grinning chaps.

Not till the howl which followed some air raids in 1916 did they take
off Gerhardt, with a variety of other elderly men, whose crime it was to
have been born in Germany. They did it suddenly, and perhaps it was as
well, for a prolonged sight of his silent misery must have upset his
family till they would have been unable to look on that bright side of
things which Mrs. Gerhardt had, as it were, always up her sleeve. When,
in charge of a big and sympathetic cons