“The child has beautiful eyes and a most sweet grace. Irish history may not account for all.” “This German Kommandant,” I asked, “what sort of a man was he?” “For a German not altogether bad,” said the Reverend Mother. “Severe and ruthless like them all, but polite when there was no occasion to be violent. He was of good family, as far as there are such things in Germany. A man of sixty.” Eileen O’Connor, with German permission, continued her work as art mistress at the _Ecole de Jeunes Filles_. After six months she was permitted to receive private pupils in her two rooms on the ground floor of the Intelligence Headquarters, in the same courtyard, though not in the same building. Her pupils came with drawing-boards and paint-boxes. They were all girls with pigtails and short frocks--not so young as they looked, because three or four at least, including the Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt, were older than schoolgirls. They played the part perfectly, and the sentries smiled at them and said, “_Guten Tag, schönes Fraulein_,” as each one passed. They were the committee of the Rescue Society: Julienne de Quesnoy, Marcelle Barbier, Yvonne Marigny, Marguérite Cléry, and Alice de Taffin, de Villers-Auxicourt. Eileen O’Connor was the director and leading spirit. It seems to me astonishing that they should have arranged the cypher, practised it, written down military information gathered from German conversations and reported to them by servants and agents under the very noses of the German intelligence officers, who could see into the sitting-room as they passed through French windows and saluted Eileen O’Connor and her young ladies if they happened to meet their eyes. It is more astonishing that, at different times, and one at a time, many fugitives (including five British soldiers who had escaped from the Citadel) slept in the cellar beneath that room, changed into German uniforms belonging to men who had died at the convent hospital--the Reverend Mother did that part of the plot--and walked quietly out in the morning by an underground passage leading to the Jardin d’Eté. The passage had been anciently built but was blocked up at one end by Eileen O’Connor’s cellar, and she and the other women broke the wall, one brick at a time, until after three months the hole was made. Their finger-nails suffered in the process, and they were afraid that the roughness of their hands might be noticed by the officers, but in spite of German spectacles they saw nothing of that. Eileen O’Connor and her friends were in constant touch with the prisoners of the Citadel and smuggled food to them. That was easy. It was done by bribing the German sentries with tobacco and meat-pies. They were also in communication with other branches of the work in Belgium, so that fugitives were passed on from town to town, and house to house. Their success made them confident, after many horrible fears, and for a time they were lulled into a sense of security.