appeared to be
somewhat mollified.

"I can't say I approve of your way of doing things, Monica," she
observed, but less severely than before, "and I can't think what an
English officer wants in my bedroom at ten minutes of two in the
morning, but if those Deutschers want to find him, perhaps I can
understand!"

Here she smiled affectionately on the beautiful girl at my side.

"Ah! Mary, you're a dear," replied Monica.

"I knew you'd help us. Why, a British officer in Germany ... isn't it
too thrilling?"

She turned to me.

"But, Des," she said, "what do you want me to do?"

I knew I could trust Monica and I resolved I would trust her friend
too... she looked a white woman all right. And if she was a friend of
Monica's, her heart would be in the right place. Francis and I had known
Monica all our lives almost. Her father had lived for years ... indeed
to the day of his death ... in London as the principal European
representative of a big American financial house. They had lived next
door to us in London and Francis and I had known Monica from the days
when she was a pretty kid in short skirts until she had made her debut
and the American ambassadress had presented her at Buckingham Palace. At
various stages of our lives, both Francis and I had been in love with
her, I believe, but my life in the army had kept me much abroad, so
Francis had seen most of her and had been the hardest hit.

Then the father died and Monica went travelling abroad in great state,
as befits a young heiress, with a prodigiously respectable American
chaperon and a retinue of retainers. I never knew the rights of the case
between her and Francis, but at one of the German embassies abroad--I
think in Vienna--she met the young Count Rachwitz, head of one of the
great Silesian noble houses, and married him.

It was not on the usual rock--money--that this German-American marriage
was wrecked, for the Count was very wealthy himself. I had supposed that
the German man's habitual attitude of mind towards women had not suited
the girl's independent spirit on hearing that Monica, a few years after
her marriage, had left her husband and gone to live in America. I had
not seen her since she left London, and, though we wrote to one another
at intervals, I had not heard from her since the war started and had no
idea that she had returned to Germany. Monica Rachwitz was, in fact, the
last person I should ever have expected to meet in Berlin in war-tim