knickers. Women lose all sense of time and proportion at
such times. Still she did not see him. The passengers were
filing down the gangplank now; rushing down as quickly as
the careful hands of the crew would allow them, and hurling
themselves into the arms of friends and family crowded
below. Fanny strained her eyes toward that narrow
passageway, anxious, hopeful, fearful, heartsick. For the
moment Olga and the baby did not exist for her. And then
she saw him.

She saw him through an unimaginable disguise. She saw him,
and knew him in spite of the fact that the fair-haired,
sulky, handsome boy had vanished, and in his place walked a
man. His hair was close-cropped, German-fashion; his face
careworn and older than she had ever thought possible; his
bearing, his features, his whole personality stamped with an
unmistakable distinction. And his clothes were appallingly,
inconceivably German. So she saw him, and he was her
brother, and she was his sister, and she stretched out her
arms to him.

"Teddy!" She hugged him close, her face buried in his
shoulder. "Teddy, you--you Spitzbube you!" She laughed
at that, a little hysterically. "Not that I know what a
Spitzbube is, but it's the Germanest word I can think of."
That shaven head. Those trousers. That linen. The awful
boots. The tie! "Oh, Teddy, and you're the Germanest thing
I ever saw." She kissed him again, rapturously.

He kissed her, too, wordlessly at first. They moved aside a