hey kindly invited her
to do--with the Baptist pastor and his wife in the Rue Haute. And
she would help Minna at the hospital, and hope to be rewarded with
the opportunity of bringing comfort and consolation to the wounded
British prisoners.

Thus, with no unbearable misery, she passed the year 1916. There
were short commons in the way of food, and the cold was sometimes
cruel. But Madame Walcker was a wonderful cook and could make soup
from a sausage skewer, and heaped _edredons_ on Vivie's bed. Vivie
sighed a little over the Blue Placards which announced endless
German victories by land and sea; and she gasped over the dreadful
Red Placards with their lists of victims sentenced to death by the
military courts. She ground her teeth over the announcement of
Gabrielle Petit's condemnation, and behind the shut door of Minna's
small sitting-room--and she only shut the door not to compromise
Minna--she raved over the judicial murder of this Belgian heroine,
who was shot, as was Edith Cavell, for nothing more than assisting
young Belgians to escape from German-occupied Belgium.

She witnessed the air-raids of the Allies, when only comforting
papers were dropped on Brussels city, but bombs on the German
aerodromes outside; and she also saw the Germans turn their guns
from the aeroplanes--which soared high out of their reach or skimmed
below range--on to thickly-inhabited streets of the poorer quarters,
to teach them to cheer the air-craft of the Allies!

She beheld--or she was told of--many acts of rapine, considered
cruelty and unreasoning ferocity on the part of German officials or
soldiers; yet saw or heard of acts and episodes of unlooked-for
kindness, forbearance and sympathy from the same hated people. Von
Giesselin, after all, was a not uncommon type; and as to Minna von
Stachelberg, she was a saint of the New Religion, the Service of
Man.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE BOMB IN PORTLAND PLACE

Mrs. Rossiter said to herself in 1915 that she had scarcely known a
happy day, or even hour, since the War began. In the first place
Michael had again shown violence of temper with ministers of state
over the release from prison of "that" Miss Warren--"a convict doing
a sentence of hard labour." And then, when he had got her released,
and gone himself with their beautiful new motor--whatever _could_
the chauffeur have thought?--to meet her at the prison gates,
_there_ he was, afterwards, worrying himself over the War: not