Adler came to the end and gazed up at Ruth. The other women whom Hauptmann von Forstner had invited to Lauengratz and who had used those apartments above evidently had been of unquestionable loyalty, for the secretary, when he gazed up at this guest of his dead master, did not challenge her. He sought information to prepare himself for the visit of Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch, not half an hour away. “Besides these, _gnädiges Fräulein_,” he appealed anxiously, “did Herr Hauptmann make no verbal mention of other matters?” Ruth shook her head. “Personal matters between him and myself,” she said. “But he did not go into the reports of others with me at all. In fact, he would not even receive my report; since I was coming into Germany I could make it myself to Oberst-Lieutenant Fallenbosch. That would be safer, he said.” This true recital threw Adler into gesturing despair. “Exactly; it is precisely what he would do! It is safest; it is most discreet to put nothing, or as little as possible, upon paper. That is always his obsession! So discreet! When I say to him it is not always safer he laughs or tells me to mind my own business! Discretion! It is because he is so obsessed by it that he directs our secret service for the district. ‘Have merely an ordered mind, a good memory, Adler,’ he always says to me, ‘and nothing will be misplaced, nothing will get astray, nothing will be obtained by others.’ “‘Yes, Herr Hauptmann,’ I say, ‘but suppose something happen to that ordered mind and that good memory! What then?’ Ah! He laughs at me and pats me on the back so indulgently. But where is that ordered mind; where now is that memory to which the most important things may be committed? Well, he is away from the trouble,” the secretary raged in his dismay. “He can hear nothing which Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch may say of him. But I--I will get it.... Yet you can make your report to him. At least, that much may be added. You have come from where, Fräulein Brun? Which front?” he beseeched hopefully. “From Picardy,” Ruth said. “I had the honor to be assigned to Roisel and to attach myself, particularly, to the British Fifth Army.” “Ah! I salute you, _gnädiges Fräulein_, and your comrades for the wonderful work you have done. But the importance of that is past, Fräulein Brun! Since then where have you been?” “My duty, as I interpreted it, was to retreat with the British; so I was swept back with them to Compiègne. Since then, as I explained to Herr Hauptmann, passport difficulties detained me in Paris.” “Then all from Reims to Soissons is in Herr Hauptmann’s ordered mind! It is, as all the most essential would be, in his ‘good memory’! And, by the latest, today the report was to start to great headquarters!”