The week before she had been in doubt as to whether to receive a Calvinist pastor or a Catholic priest.  In her cosmopolitan life of uncertain nationality she had never taken the time to decide about any religion for herself.  Finally she had selected the latter on account of its being more simple intellectually, more liberal and approachable....

Several times when the priest was trying to console her, she interrupted him as though she were the one charged with inspiring courage.

“To die is not so terrible as it appears when seen afar off!...  I feel ashamed when I think of the fears that I have passed through, of the tears that I have shed....  It turns out to be much more simple than I had believed....  We all have to die!”

They read to her the sentence refusing the appeal for pardon.  Then they offered her a pen that she might sign it.

A colonel told her that there were still a few moments at her disposition in which to write to her family, her friends, or to make her last will....

“To whom shall I write?” said Freya.  “I haven’t a single friend in the world....”

“Then it was,” continued the lawyer, “that she took the pen as if a recollection had occurred to her, and traced some few lines....  Then she tore up the paper and came toward me.  She was thinking of you, Captain:  her last letter was for you and she left it unfinished, fearing that it might never reach your hands.  Besides, she wasn’t equal to writing; her pulse was nervous:  she preferred to talk....  She asked me to send you a long, very long letter, telling about her last moments, and I had to swear to her that I would carry out her request.”

From that time on the maitre had seen things badly.  Emotion was perturbing his sensibilities, but there yet lived in his mind Freya’s last words on coming out of the jail.

“I am not a German,” she said repeatedly to the men in uniform.  “I am not German!”

For her the least important thing was to die.  She was only worried for fear they might believe her of that odious nationality.

The attorney found himself in an automobile with many men whom he scarcely knew.  Other vehicles were before and behind theirs.  In one of them was Freya with the nuns and the priest.

A faint streak was whitening the sky, marking the points of the roofs.  Below, in the deep blackness of the streets, the renewed life of daybreak was slowly beginning.  The first laborers going to their work with their hands in their pockets, and the market women returning from market pushing their carts, turned their heads, following with interest this procession of swift vehicles almost all of them with men in the box seat beside the conductor.  To the working-folk, this was perhaps a morning wedding....  Perhaps these were gay people coming from a nocturnal fiesta....  Several times the cortege slackened its speed, blocked by a row of heavy carts with mountains of garden-stuff.