notable engagements, for Heloise to become secretary to Gisela Döring.
She never dared admit that she received a generous monthly cheque for
her services, but Gisela was a favorite with the old lady (always
sitting placidly in her chair, with her hands in her lap, a faint ironic
smile on her still pretty face), and as her literary style was extolled
by her exacting daughters (Frau von Erkel never read even a German
newspaper, but subscribed for _Le Figaro_), and as she knew Gisela to
be a member of her own class, the new connection was harmonious; and
Heloise at last experienced something like real liberty in the tiny
garden house of the parterre apartment of Gisela Döring on the
Königinstrasse.


2

There is little time in the war zones to meet and talk, but even nurses
must rest and take the air, and during the month before the frightful
rush of wounded after the British offensive on the Somme began, the four
girls, all in different hospitals, maneuvered to obtain leave of absence
at the same hour, early in the evening. They promenaded the desolate
streets arm in arm, their heads together, relieving their burdened
souls. There was no idea of treason in any one of those rebellious
minds, for they still believed their Fatherland to have been on the
defensive from the first, the victim of a conspiracy, and they knew from
the expression of the officers' faces, to say nothing of their tempers,
that the danger was by no means past.

But being women, and women who had thought for themselves for many
years, they must talk it out, and when too overcharged to trust their
comments to the narrow streets, they retired to a hillock outside the