red to health then to stand on the steps of some monument and
cry "Vive la Belgique! A bas les tyrans!" The policemen and the
spies looked another way and affected deafness. They had orders not
to arrest her unless she actually resorted to firearms or other
lethal weapons.

It was said that her appeal for Bertie Adams did reach the Emperor,
two days too late; that he pished and pshawed over von Bissing's
cruel precipitancy. "Englishmen," he muttered to his entourage,
"don't assassinate. The Irish do. But _how_ I'm going to make peace
with England, _I_ don't know...!"

(His Hell on Earth must have been that few people admired the
English character more than he did, and yet, unprovoked, he had
blundered into war with England.)

However, though it was too late to save "this lunatic Adams," he
gave orders that Vivie was to be let alone. He even, through Graefin
von Stachelberg, transmitted to her his regrets that she and her
mother had been treated so cavalierly at the Hotel Imperial. It was
not through any orders of his.

So: Vivie became quite a power in Brussels during that last anxious
year and a half of waiting, between May, 1917, and November, 1918.
German soldiers, still limping from their wounds, saluted her in the
street, remembering her kindness in hospital, and the letters she
unweariedly wrote at their dictation to their wives and
families--for she had become quite a scholar in German. The scanty
remains of the British Colony and the great ladies among the
patriotic Belgians now realized how false were the stories that had
circulated about her in the first year of the War; and extended to
her their friendship. And the Spanish Minister who had taken the
place of the American as protector of British subjects, invited her
to all the fetes he gave for Belgian charities and Red Cross funds.
Through his Legation she endeavoured to send information to the
Y.M.C.A. and to Bertie's widow that Albert Adams of the Y.M.C.A.
"had died in Brussels from the consequences of the War."

I dare say in the autumn of 1917, if Vivien Warren had applied
through the Spanish Minister for a passport to leave Belgium for
some neutral country, it would have been accorded to her: the German
authorities would have been thankful to see her no more. She
reminded them of one of the cruellest acts of their administration.
But she preferred to stay for the historical revenge of seeing the
Germans driven out of Belgium, and Belgian independ