After that Vivie passed three days of great sickness and nausea, a furred tongue, and positively no appetite. Finally she arose a week after the execution and looked at herself in the mirror. She was terribly haggard, she looked at least fifty-five--"They must have taken me for his mother or his aunt; never for his sweetheart," she commented bitterly to herself. And her brown-gold hair was now distinctly a cinder grey. The next day she went back to work at the hospital. To Minna, she said: "I can _never, never, never_ forget your kindness and sympathy. 'Sister' seems an insufficient name to call you by. Whatever happens, unless you cast me off, we shall be friends.... I dare say I even owe my life to you, if it is worth anything. But it is. I want to live--now--I want to live to be revenged. I want to live to help Bertie's"--her voice still shook over the name--"Bertie's wife and children. I expect but for you I should have been tried already in the Senate for complicity with ... Bertie ... and found guilty and shot..." _Minna_: "I won't go so far as to say you are right. But I certainly _was_ alarmed about you, when you were arrested. Of course I knew nothing--_nothing_--about that poor young man till just before his execution when Pastor Walcker came to me. Even then I could do nothing, and I understood so badly what had happened. But about you: I said to myself, if I do not do _something_, you can perhaps be sentenced to imprisonment ... and I _did_ bestir myself, you can bet!" (Minna liked to show she knew a slangy phrase or two.) "So I telegraphed to the Emperor, I besieged von Bissing at the Ministere des Sciences et des Arts; wrote to him, telegraphed to him, telephoned to him, sat in his anterooms, neglected my hospital work entirely from Friday to Monday-- "I expect as a matter of fact they found nothing in that poor young's man's papers to implicate you. They just wanted--the brutes--to give you a good fright ... and I dare say ... such is the military mind--even wished you to see him shot. "By the bye, I suppose you have heard that von Bissing is very ill? Dying, perhaps--" _Vivie_: "I _hope_ so. I am _so_ glad. I hope it's a painful illness and that he'll die and find there really _is_ a Hell, and an uncommonly hot one!"