t day.

'Another victory,' said Anna. 'Many more prisoners and guns.'

Frau Ebermann purred, one might almost say grunted, contentedly.

'That is good too,' she said; and Anna, after lighting the inhaler-lamp,
went out.

Frau Ebermann reflected that in an hour or so the aspirin would begin to
work, and all would be well. To-morrow--no, the day after--she would
take up life with something to talk over with her friends at coffee. It
was rare--every one knew it--that she should be overcome by any
ailment. Yet in all her distresses she had not allowed the minutest
deviation from daily routine and ritual. She would tell her friends--she
ran over their names one by one--exactly what measures she had taken
against the lace cover on the radiator-top and in regard to her two
tortoise-shell hair brushes and the comb at right angles. How she had
set everything in order--everything in order. She roved further afield
as she wriggled her toes luxuriously on the hot-water bottle. If it
pleased our dear God to take her to Himself, and she was not so young as
she had been--there was that plate of the four lower ones in the blue
tooth-glass, for instance--He should find all her belongings fit to meet
His eye. 'Swept and garnished' were the words that shaped themselves in
her intent brain. 'Swept and garnished for--'

No, it was certainly not for the dear Lord that she had swept; she would
have her room swept out to-morrow or the day after, and garnished. Her
hands began to swell again into huge pillows of nothingness. Then they
shrank, and so did her head, to minute dots. It occurred to her that she
was waiting for some event, some tremendously important event, to come
to pass. She lay with shut eyes for a long time till her head and hands
should return to their proper size.

She opened her eyes with a jerk.

'How stupid of me,' she said aloud, 'to set the room in order for a
parcel of dirty little children!'

They were there--five of them, two little boys and three girls--headed
by the anxious-eyed ten-year-old whom she had seen before. They must
have entered by the outer door, which Anna had neglected to shut behind
her when she returned with the inhaler. She counted them backward and
forward as one counts scales--one, two, three, four, five.

They took no notice of her, but hung about, first on one foot then on
the other, like strayed chickens, the smaller ones holding by the
larger. They had the air of utterly wearied passe