"Don't jest," said Otto. "I am in earnest."

"In truth, so am I!" answered Gustav. "You are crazy, just plain
crazy. The man is no more a spy than I am, I'll be bound!"

Otto shrugged his broad shoulders. "You don't know whereof you speak,"
he said. "You have not heard him talk, have you?"

"No, I'll grant that," Gustav acknowledged. "Have him brought in and
let me hear him."

"Very well," said Otto, "but speak English to him. His German is so
bad that he ought to he shot for that if for nothing else."

He turned and summoned an orderly. The two men sat in silence. At a
nearby table two lieutenants were busy writing. They did not speak but
looked eagerly as the door opened, and the prisoners entered. The
Lieutenants shifted in their chairs and smiled at each other in
anticipation. Gustav caught their fleeting grins and dismissed them
from the room with a curt command, then turned his attention to the
group standing just within the door.

Professor Morris stood with a protecting arm around each of his
children. He looked broken and old, and wore the air of a man who has
been rudely wakened from a secure and comfortable sleep to view some
unimagined horror. The War, the bombardment and the fall of Warsaw,
had at last become something more than a spectacle to be transferred to
the pages of his book. It was a frightful fact, a living reality in
which men died by thousands, and little children perished, where
women's hearts broke with their anguish and despair.