she
commented bitterly to herself. And her brown-gold hair was now
distinctly a cinder grey.

The next day she went back to work at the hospital.

To Minna, she said: "I can _never, never, never_ forget your
kindness and sympathy. 'Sister' seems an insufficient name to call
you by. Whatever happens, unless you cast me off, we shall be
friends.... I dare say I even owe my life to you, if it is worth
anything. But it is. I want to live--now--I want to live to be
revenged. I want to live to help Bertie's"--her voice still shook
over the name--"Bertie's wife and children. I expect but for you I
should have been tried already in the Senate for complicity with ...
Bertie ... and found guilty and shot..."

_Minna_: "I won't go so far as to say you are right. But I certainly
_was_ alarmed about you, when you were arrested. Of course I knew
nothing--_nothing_--about that poor young man till just before his
execution when Pastor Walcker came to me. Even then I could do
nothing, and I understood so badly what had happened. But about you:
I said to myself, if I do not do _something_, you can perhaps be
sentenced to imprisonment ... and I _did_ bestir myself, you can
bet!" (Minna liked to show she knew a slangy phrase or two.) "So I
telegraphed to the Emperor, I besieged von Bissing at the Ministere
des Sciences et des Arts; wrote to him, telegraphed to him,
telephoned to him, sat in his anterooms, neglected my hospital work
entirely from Friday to Monday--

"I expect as a matter of fact they found nothing in that poor
young's man's papers to implicate you. They just wanted--the
brutes--to give you a good fright ... and I dare say ... such is the
military mind--even wished you to see him shot.

"By the bye, I suppose you have heard that von Bissing is very ill?
Dying, perhaps--"

_Vivie_: "I _hope_ so. I am _so_ glad. I hope it's a painful
illness and that he'll die and find there really _is_ a Hell, and an
uncommonly hot one!"

It must not be supposed from the frequent quotations from Countess
von Stachelberg's condemnations of German cruelties that she was an
unpatriotic woman, repudiating, apostatizing from her own country.
On the contrary: she held--mistakenly or not--that Germany had been
the victim of secret diplomacy, had been encircled by a ring fence
of enemies, refused the economic guarantees she required, and the
colonial expansion she desired. Minna disliked the Slavs, did not
believe in them, save as musici