dear, that Germany conducted this war with the greatest possible barbarity? Otherwise why should the world call them Huns?"
Elsa said it was only the English who called the Germans Huns, and that was for a propaganda of hatred which was very wicked.
"Do I look like a Hun?" she asked, and then burst into tears.
Lady Brand was disconcerted by that sign of weakness.
"You mustn't think us unkind, Elsa, but of course we have to uphold the truth."
Ethel was utterly unmoved by Elsa's tears, and, indeed, found a holy satisfaction in them.
"When the German people confess their guilt with weeping and lamentation, the English will be first to forgive. Never till then."
The presence of a German girl in the house seemed to act as a blight upon all domestic happiness. It was the cook who first "gave notice." Elsa had never so much as set eyes upon that cross-eyed woman below-stairs who had prepared the family food since Wickham had sat in a high chair, with a bib round his neck. But Mary, in a private interview with Lady Brand, stormy in its character, as Elsa could hear through the folding-doors, vowed that she would not live in the same house with "one of those damned Germings."
Lady Brand's tearful protestations that Elsa was no longer German, being "Mr. Wickham's wife," and that she had repented sincerely of all the wrong done by the country in which she had unfortunately been born, did not weaken the resolution of Mary Grubb, whose patriotism had always been "above suspicion," "which," as she said, "I hope to remain so." She went next morning, after a great noise of breathing and the descent of tin boxes, while Lady Brand and Ethel looked with re-
