‘Where did the child go?’ moaned Frau Ebermann—­’the child that was here?’

‘There was no child,’ said startled Anna.  ’How should any child come in when I shut the door behind me after I go out?  All the keys of the flats are different.’

’No, no!  You forgot this time.  But my back is aching, and up my legs also.  Besides, who knows what it may have fingered and upset?  Look and see.’

‘Nothing is fingered, nothing is upset,’ Anna replied, as she took the inhaler from its paper box.

’Yes, there is.  Now I remember all about it.  Put—­put that white thing, with the open edge—­the lace, I mean—­quite straight on that—­’ she pointed.  Anna, accustomed to her ways, understood and went to it.

‘Now, is it quite straight?’ Frau Ebermann demanded.

‘Perfectly,’ said Anna.  ‘In fact, in the very centre of the radiator.’  Anna measured the equal margins with her knuckle, as she had been told to do when she first took service.

‘And my tortoise-shell hair brushes?’ Frau Ebermann could not command her dressing-table from where she lay.

’Perfectly straight, side by side in the big tray, and the comb laid across them.  Your watch also in the coralline watch-holder.  Everything’—­she moved round the room to make sure—­’everything is as you have it when you are well.’  Frau Ebermann sighed with relief.  It seemed to her that the room and her head had suddenly grown cooler.

‘Good!’ said she.  ’Now warm my night-gown in the kitchen, so it will be ready when I have perspired.  And the towels also.  Make the inhaler steam, and put in the eucalyptus; that is good for the larynx.  Then sit you in the kitchen, and come when I ring.  But, first, my hot-water bottle.’

It was brought and scientifically tucked in.

‘What news?’ said Frau Ebermann drowsily.  She had not been out that day.

‘Another victory,’ said Anna.  ‘Many more prisoners and guns.’

Frau Ebermann purred, one might almost say grunted, contentedly.

‘That is good too,’ she said; and Anna, after lighting the inhaler-lamp, went out.

Frau Ebermann reflected that in an hour or so the aspirin would begin to work, and all would be well.  To-morrow—­no, the day after—­she would take up life with something to talk over with her friends at coffee.  It was rare—­every one knew it—­that she should be overcome by any ailment.  Yet in all her distresses she had not allowed the minutest deviation from daily routine and ritual.  She would tell her friends—­she ran over their names one by one—­exactly what measures she had taken against the lace cover on the radiator-top and in regard to her two tortoise-shell hair brushes and the comb at right angles.  How she had set everything in order—­everything in order.  She roved further afield as she wriggled her toes luxuriously on the hot-water bottle.  If it pleased our dear God to take her to Himself, and she was not so young as she had been—­there was that plate of the four lower ones in the blue tooth-glass, for instance—­He should find all her belongings fit to meet His eye.  ‘Swept and garnished’ were the words that shaped themselves in her intent brain.  ‘Swept and garnished for—­’