., etc. He still
refused absolutely to allow Vivie to proceed to her room and look
for her money. She might perhaps be allowed to do so when the
Emperor was gone. As to her luggage he would have it sent over to
the tea-shop. (The money, it might be noted, she never recovered.
There were many things also missing from her mother's trunks and no
satisfaction was ever obtained.)

So there was Vivie, one dismal, rainy November evening in 1915;
homeless, her mother lying dead in a room of this tea-shop, and in
her own pocket only a matter of thirty thousand francs to provide
for her till the War was over. A thousand pounds in fluctuating
value was all that was left of a nominal twenty thousand of the year
before.

But the financial aspect of the case for the time being did not
concern her. The death of her mother had been a stunning shock, and
when she crossed over to the hotel--what irony, by the bye, to think
she had been born there thirty-nine years ago, in the old inn that
had preceded the twice rebuilt hotel!--when she crossed the street
with Minna, it had been with blazing, tearless eyes and the desire
to take the hotel manager and his minions by the coat collar, fling
_them_ into the street, and assert her right to go up to her room.
But now her violence was spent and she was a broken, weeping woman
as she sat all night by the bedside of her dead mother, holding the
cold hand, imprinting kisses on the dead face which was now that of
a saintly person with nothing of the reprobate in its lineaments.

* * * * *

The burial for various reasons had to take place in the Cemetery of
St. Josse-ten-Noode, near the shuddery National Shooting Range where
Edith Cavell and numerous Belgian patriots had recently been
executed. Minna von Stachelberg left her hospital, with some one
else in charge, and insisted on accompanying Vivie to the interment.
This might have been purely "laic"; not on account of any harsh
dislike to the religious ceremony on Vivie's part; only due to the
fact that she knew no priest or pastor. But there appeared at the
grave-side to make a very suitable and touching discourse and to
utter one or two heartfelt prayers, a Belgian Baptist minister, a
relation of Mme. Trouessart.

Waterloo left many curious things behind it. Not only a tea-shop or
two; but a Nonconformist nucleus, that intermarried, as Sergeant
Walker or Walcker had done, with Belgian women and left descendant