Here one could still revel in Teuton delicacies, beer brewed in Hamburg, but declared to be "Danish," the succulent German liver sausage, the sausage of Frankfort--boiled in pairs of course--the palatable sauerkraut with the black sour bread of the Fatherland to match. "I wish you could get rid of Kennedy," said Ortmann, as he again, in confidence, bent across the table towards Ella's father. "I believe she's in collusion with him." "No," laughed the elder man, "I can't believe that. Ella is too good a daughter of the Fatherland." He was one of Germany's chief agents in England, and had much money in secret at his command. Ortmann screwed up his eyes and pursed his lips. He was a shrewd, clever man, and very difficult to deceive. "Money is at stake, my dear Drost," he whispered very slowly--"big money. But there is love also. And I believe--nay, I'm sure--that Kennedy loves her." "Bah! utterly ridiculous!" cried her father. "I don't believe that for a single moment. She's only fooling him, as she has fooled all the others." "All right. But I've watched. You have not," was the cold reply. From time to time the attractive Ella, on her part, glanced across at her father, who was whispering with his overdressed companion, and, to the keen observer, it would have been apparent that she was only smoking and gossiping with that pair of low-bred foreigners for distinct purposes of her own. The truth was that, with her woman's instinct, feminine cleverness and ingenuity, she, being filled with the enthusiasm of affection for her aviator-lover, was playing a fiercely desperate part as a staunch and patriotic daughter of Great Britain. The hour was late. She had hurried from the theatre in a taxi, the carmine still about her pretty lips, her eyes still darkened beneath, and the greasepaint only roughly rubbed off. The great gold and white theatre near Leicester Square, where, clad in transparencies, she was "leading lady" in that most popular revue "Half a Moment!" had been packed to suffocation, as indeed it was nightly. Officers and men home on leave from the battle-front all made a point of seeing the pretty, sweet-faced Stella Steele, who danced with such artistic movement, and who sang those catchy patriotic songs of hers, the stirring choruses of which even reached the ears of the Bosches in their trenches. And in many a British dug-out in Flanders there was hung a programme of the revue, or a picture postcard of the seductive Stella. There were, perhaps, other Stella Steeles on the stage, for the name was, after all, not an uncommon one, but this star of the whole Steele family had arisen from the theatrical firmament since the war. She, the laughing girl who, that night, sat in that obscure, smoke-laden little den of aliens in Soho, was earning annually more than the "pooled" salary of a British Cabinet Minister.