d. I think the head
gardener of the Jardin Botanique who had charge of the Tropical
houses cribbed from the collections some of the most magnificent
blooms, and presented them to Vivie on the morning of her marriage;
and that afterwards she laid the bouquet on her mother's newly
finished tomb in the cemetery of St. Josse-ten-Noode, where, the
weather being singularly mild for the time of year, the flowers
lasted fresh and blooming for several days.

I am sure she and Michael then crossed the road and passed on to the
building of the Tir National; entered it and stood for a moment in
the verandah from which Vivie had seen Bertie Adams executed; and
passed on over the tussocky grass to the graves of Bertie Adams and
Edith Cavell, where they did silent homage to the dead. I believe a
few days afterwards they visited the Senate where the victims of von
Bissing's "Terror" had been tried, browbeaten, insulted, mocked. And
the functionary who showed them over this superb national palace is
certain to have included in his exposition the once splendid
carpets which the German officers prior to their evacuation of the
Senate--all but the legislative chamber of which was used as a
barracks for rough soldiery--had sprayed and barred, streaked and
splodged with printing ink. He would also have pointed out the
three-hundred-year-old tapestries they had ripped from the walls and
the historical portraits they had slashed, and would again have
emphasized the fact that in all these senseless devastations the
officers were far worse than the men.

Also I am certain that Michael and Vivie made a pilgrimage to the
prison of Saint-Gilles, and stood silently in the cell where Bertie
Adams and Vivie had spent those terrible days of suspense and
despair between April 6 and April 8, 1917; and that when they
entered that other compartment of the prison where Edith Cavell had
passed her last days before her execution, they listened with
sympathetic reverence to the recital by the Directeur of verses from
"l'Hymne d'Edith Cavell"--as it is now called--no other than the sad
old poem of human sorrow, _Abide with me_; and that they appreciated
to the full the warmth of Belgian feeling which has turned the cell
of Edith Cavell into a Chapelle Ardente in perpetuity.

I think they returned to England in January, 1919, so that Michael
might get back quickly to his work of mending the maimed, now
transferred to English hospitals; and so that Vivie--alw