Casting a swift glance about me, I took in that group of faces round the kitchen fire. Who were they, these people? François, and Lenore, Henri, Ada, and the little old grey-moustached man whistling like a bird, who were they? Why were they here among the Germans? Why had they not fled with the million fugitives. Was it possible they were spies? For I knew now, beyond all doubting, that there were indeed such things as spies, though the English mind finds it almost impossible to believe in the reality of something so dedicated to the gentle art of making melodrama. Until three days ago I had never seen these people in my life. I knew absolutely nothing about them. Perhaps they were even now carefully drawing the net around me. Perhaps I was already a prisoner in the Germans' hands. And yet they were all I had in the way of acquaintances, they were all I had to trust in. Could I trust them? I looked at them again. It was strange, and rather wonderful, to have nothing on earth to help one but one's own judgment. Then Ada's voice reached me. "Voici, Louisa!" she is saying. "Voici le photographie de mon Georges." And she bends over me with a little old locket, and inside I see a small boy's fair, brave little face, and Ada's tears splash on my hand.... "I sent them away because I feared the Alboches might harm them," she breaks out, uncontrollably. "For mon Mari and myself, we have no fear! And we had not money for ourselves to go. But my Georges, and my Clare, and my petite Ada--I could not bear the thought that the Alboches might hurt them. Oh, mes petites, mes petites! They wept so. They did not want to go. 'Let us stay here with you, Mama.' But I made them go. I sold my bijoux, my all, to get money enough for them to go to England. Oh, the English will be good to them, won't they, Louisa? Tell me the English will be good to my petites." Sometimes, in England since, when I have heard some querulous suburban English heart voicing itself grandiloquently, out of the plethora of its charity-giving, as "_a bit fed up with the refugees_" I think of myself, with a passionate sincerity and fanatic belief in England's goodness and justice, assuring that weeping mother that her Georges and Clare and little Ada with the long hair curls would be cared for by the English--the tender, generous, grateful English--as though they were their own little ones--even better perhaps, even better! Ada's tears! They wash away my fears. My heart melts to her, and I tell her straightway about the house in the avenue L. "But how splendid!" she cries exuberantly. "Quel chance, Louisa, quel chance!" cries Lenore. "To-morrow morning we shall all take you there!" declares Henri. Their surprise, their delight, allay my last lingering doubts. "But mind," I urge them feverishly. "You must never let the Danish Doctor know that address." That night I sleep in a feather-bed in a room at the top of dear Ada's house.