“Tell your Englishwoman from me that if she marries you and comes to this country she will be as a leper whom nobody will touch. Never shall she cross this threshold! Oskar, my son, I love you, and I have waited all this time for you; I am old, too, and have not much longer to live, but rather than hear you had married an Englishwoman I would see you dead and buried.” When Mona looks up from the letter, Oskar is gazing into her face with a ghastly smile. “That’s a nice thing to send a fellow after four years’ imprisonment, isn’t it?” he says, and then he breaks into heart-breaking laughter. “I was so sure of her, too. I thought she would do anything for me--anything.” Again he laughs--wildly, fiercely. “What has happened to the woman? Has the accursed war taken all the heart out of her? The German people, too--have they all gone mad? Starving German children, drowning German sailors, burning German airmen! Good Lord, has the whole nation gone crazy?” Mona feels as if she were choking. “She is old and hasn’t much longer to live, and just because I’m going to marry the best girl in the world and take her home with me....” But his laughter breaks into sobs and he can say no more. Mona feels the tears in her throat as well as in her eyes, but at length she says: “Oskar, it’s all my fault. I’ve come between you. You must go home without me--to your country and your mother.” Oskar lifts his broken face and cries: “Country? Mother? I’ve got no country and no mother either. Go home to them? Never! Never in this world!” At the next moment he has gone off, with long strides, before Mona can reach out her hand to stop him. Being alone, she has to go on with her work as usual--the “creatures” have to be milked and foddered. But after the men from the compounds have been served (only three of them now) she has time to think out her situation. Since Oskar’s mother refuses to receive her, Germany also is closed to them. Because she loves Oskar, and Oskar loves her, and they are of different races and their nations have been at war, they are to be hunted through the world as outcasts, and no place is to be left for them. “Poor Oskar! It’s hardest for him, though,” she thinks. _THIRTEENTH CHAPTER_ The men of the Fourth and Fifth Compounds, three-quarters of the guard and many of the officers have gone, when a stranger comes to the camp to make a bid for the purchase of the booths and huts. After a tour of the wooden buildings he arrives at the farm-yard, and steps on to the mounting-block to take a general view, and at the same moment Mona comes to the door of her dairy. He is an American, a cheerful and rather free-spoken person, and he says, with a smile on his lips, by way of excuse for opening a conversation: “I guess the farm-house is not for sale, is it?” “You must ask the landlord about that, sir,” says Mona. “Not you also? You’re the tenant of the farm, aren’t you?”