Gisela opened his shirt gently and bared his breast.  She held her breath, but he slept on and she took the dagger from her belt and with a swift hard propulsion drove it into his heart to the guard.  He gave a long expiring sigh and lay still.  A gallant gentleman, a brave soldier, and a great lover had the honor to be the first man to pay the price of his country’s crime, on the altar of the Woman’s Revolution.

3

Gisela went swiftly down the hall and awakened Heloise, Mimi, and Marie and told them what she had done.  No novelty in horror could startle European women in those days.  They dressed themselves hastily in their gray uniforms and followed her to the Saal.  With Mimi’s assistance she put on his coat, the hilt of the dagger thrusting forward the row of medals on his breast.  Marie went out into the street and flitted up and down like a big gray moth, her gray little face tense with rapture.  Her devotion to Gisela had been fanatical from the first but now she begged what invisible power her wild little mind still recognized to be permitted to die for her.

In a moment she signaled that the street was deserted.  Gisela and Mimi carried the body over to the park and dropped it into the swiftly flowing Isar.  The clear jade green of the lovely river reflected the points of the stars, and Franz von Nettelbeck as he drifted down the tide looked as if attended by innumerable candles dropped graciously from on high to watch at his bier.  But it was to Heloise this fancy came, and she lifted her face and thanked the stars for their silent funeral march.  Not for her would the supreme sacrifice have been possible, and for the moment she did not envy Gisela Doering.

The four girls walked rapidly over to the Maximilianstrasse and crossed the bridge to the Maximilianeum.  The long symmetrical brown building with its open galleries filled with the cold starlight was distorted by a wireless station on its highest point and by a biplane on the extreme left of the roof.  It stood on a lofty terrace and commanded a view of all Munich and of the tumbled peaks of the Alps.

They ran up the stairs and called to the operator from the higher gallery.  She answered in a hard and weary voice:  “Nothing.”  Then they walked down the gallery to the open tower facing the Alps.  For half an hour longer they stood in silence, alternately glancing from their wrist watches to the faintly glittering peaks whose first reflection of dawn, if all went well, would change the face of the world.

VI

1

The eyes of the four women traveled to the lofty towers of the Frauenkirche.  Its bells rang out a wild authoritative summons.  Coincidentally the streets filled with women dressed uniformly in gray—­big powerfully built women, sturdy products of the strong soil of Germany.  They did not march, nor form in ranks, but stood silent, alert, shouldering rifles with fixed bayonets.