The girl had come to Lille just before the war, as an art mistress in an “_Ecole de Jeunes Filles_” (her parents in Kensington had too big a family to keep them all), with lessons twice a week at the convent, and private pupils in her own rooms. She learned to speak French quickly and charmingly, and her gift of humour, her Irish frankness and comradeship made her popular among her pupils, so that she had many invitations to their homes and became well known in the best houses of Lille--mostly belonging to rich manufacturers. A commonplace story till then. But when the Germans occupied Lille this Irish girl became one of the chief characters in a drama that was exciting and fantastic to the point of melodrama. It was she who organised the Lille branch of a secret society of women, with a network all over northern France and Belgium--the world remembers Nurse Cavell at Brussels--for the escape of young civilians of military age and prisoners of war, combining that work (frightfully perilous) with espionage on German movements of troops and other facts that might be of value to the Belgian Army, and through them to England and France. It was out of an old book of Jules Verne called “The Cryptogram” that she copied the cypher in which she wrote her messages (in invisible ink on linen handkerchiefs and rags), and she had an audacity of invention in numberless small tricks and plots which constantly broke through the meshes of the German network of military police. “She had a contempt for their stupidity,” said the Reverend Mother. “Called them dunderheads, and one strange word of which I do not know the meaning--‘yobs’--and I trembled at the risks she took.” She lived with one maid in two rooms on the ground floor of a house near the Jardin d’Eté, the rest of the house being used as the headquarters of the German Intelligence Section of the Northern District. All day long officers went in and out, and by day and night there were always sentries at the door. Yet it was there that was established also the headquarters of the Rescue Committee. It was on account of her Irish name and parentage that Eileen O’Connor was permitted to remain in the two rooms to the left of the courtyard, entered by a separate door. The German Kommandant was a man who firmly believed that the Irish nation was ready to break out into revolt against the English, and that all Irish--men and women--hated the British Empire as much as any Prussian. Eileen O’Connor played up to this _idée fixe_, saw the value of it as a wonderful means of camouflage, lent the Kommandant books on Irish history dealing with the injustice of England to Ireland (in which she firmly believed as a staunch Nationalist), and educated him so completely to the belief that she was anti-English (as she was in politics, though not in war) that he had no doubt of her. Here the Reverend Mother made a remark which seemed to illuminate Eileen O’Connor’s story, as well as her own knowledge of human nature.