me--here--it is at any rate the only way in
which you can see and help your countrymen."

One day in November when their notice at the hotel was nearly
expired, Vivie proposed an expedition to her mother. They would walk
slowly--because Mrs. Warren now got easily out of breath--up to the
Jardin Bontanique; Vivie would leave her there in the Palm House. It
was warm; it was little frequented; there were seats and the
Belgians in charge knew Mrs. Warren of old time. Vivie would then go
on along the inner Boulevards by tram and look at some rooms
recommended by Minna von Stachelberg in the Quartier St. Gilles.

Mrs. Warren did as she was told. Vivie left her seated in one of the
long series of glass houses overlooking Brussels from a terrace,
wherein are assembled many glories of the tropics: palms, dracaenas,
yuccas, aloes, tree-ferns, cycads, screw-pines, and bananas:
promising to be back in an hour's time.

Somehow as she sat there it seemed to Mrs. Warren it was going for
her to be the last hour of fully conscious life--fully conscious and
yet a curious mingling in it of the past and present. She had sat
here in the middle of the 'seventies with Vivie's father, the young
Irish seminarist, her lover for six months. He had a vague interest
in botany, and during his convalescence after his typhoid fever,
when she was still his nurse, not yet his mistress, she used to
bring him here to rest and to enjoy the aspect of these ferns and
palms. What a strange variety of men she had known. Some she had
loved, more or less; some she had exploited frankly. Some--like
George Crofts and Baxendale Strangeways--she had feared, though in
her manner she had tried to conceal her dread of their violence.
Well! she had taken a lot of money off the rich, but she had never
plundered the poor. Her greatest conquest--and that when she was a
woman of forty--was the monarch of this very country which now lay
crushed under the Kaiser's heel. For a few months he had taken a
whimsical liking to her handsome face, well-preserved figure, and
amusing cockney talk. But he had employed her rather as the mistress
of his menus plaisirs, as his recruiting agent. He had rewarded her
handsomely. Now it was all in the dust: her beautiful Villa
Beau-sejour a befouled barrack for German soldiers. She herself a
homeless woman, repudiated by the respectable British and Americans
more or less interned in this unhappy city.

Not much more than a year ago she h