rotesting vibrations were very brief. Her eyes
fell on the ranks of women standing in the wide Maximilianstrasse,--a
street a mile long and seventy-five feet across--undisturbed by the
turmoil they had anticipated, calmly awaiting her orders. The obsession
passed, and after a brief tribute of hatred to her imagination, which
was, after all, one root of her power, she turned and glanced
critically at her three companions. Marie, looking like a little gray
gnome, was dancing about and waving her arms in ecstasy. Heloise, her
long blonde hair hanging about her fine French face, was gazing out with
rapt eyes and lips apart, as if every sense were drinking in the vision
of a Germany delivered. Mimi was standing with her arms akimbo, nodding
her head emphatically.

"Great work," she said as she met Gisela's stern eyes. "Better go up to
the wireless."

They ran rapidly up to the roof and looked into the little room. The
girl who sat there nodded but did not speak. Her face was gray and
tense, but there was no evidence of despair. Gisela and Mimi stood
motionless for what seemed to them a stifling hour, but at last the
operator laid down the receiver.

"All," she said. "Every one."

"The Rhine Valley?"

The girl nodded, then rolled her jacket into a pillow, lay down before
the door and immediately fell asleep. It had been a night of ghastly
suspense. Another operator was already running up the stair to her
relief.

"Fate!" cried Mimi. "The same fate that sank the Armada and drove
Napoleon to Moscow. You had the vision--"

"I was the chosen instrument--" Gisela walked rapidly over to the
biplane. A girl sat at the joy-stick looking as if carved out of wood.
There was no more expression on her face than if she were sitting in the
gallery at a rather dull play. Her lover and six brothers were dead in
France. She had watched her little brother and her old grandmother die
of malnutrition. Her sister was "officially pregnant" and under
surveillance lest she kill herself. No more perfect machine was at the
disposal of Gisela Doering. Whether Germany were delivered or razed to
the earth was all one to her, but she was more than willing, as a
Bavarian with a traditional hatred of Prussia, to play her part in the
downfall of a race that presumed to call itself German.

2

Gisela stepped into the machine and it glided downward and skimmed
lightly over the great length of the Maximilianstrasse.

The compact ranks, which had