“Take your head back into the berth,” ordered Anna-Rose quickly, for Anna-Felicitas seemed to be on the very brink of an apoplectic fit.

Anna-Felicitas, who was herself beginning to feel a little inconvenienced, obeyed, and was thrilled to see Anna-Rose presently very cautiously emerge from underneath her and on her bare feet creep across to the opposite side.  She knew her to be valiant to recklessness.  She sat up to watch, her eyes round with interest.

Anna-Rose didn’t go straight across, but proceeded slowly, with several pauses, to direct her steps toward the pillow-end of the berths.  Having got there she stood still a moment listening, and then putting a careful finger between the curtain of the lower berth and its frame, drew it the smallest crack aside and peeped in.

Instantly she started back, letting go the curtain.  “I beg your pardon,” she said out loud, turning very red.  “I—­I thought—­”

Anna-Felicitas, attentive in her berth, felt a cold thrill rush down her back.  No sound came from the berth on the other side any more than before the raid on it, and Anna-Rose returned quicker than she had gone.  She just stopped on the way to switch off the light, and then felt along the edge of Anna-Felicitas’s berth till she got to her head, and pulling it near her by its left pigtail whispered with her mouth close to its left ear, “Wide awake.  Watching me all the time.  Not a man.  Fat.”

And she crawled into her berth feeling unnerved.

CHAPTER V

The lady in the opposite berth was German, and so was the lady in the berth above her.  Their husbands were American, but that didn’t make them less German.  Nothing ever makes a German less German, Anna-Rose explained to Anna-Felicitas.

“Except,” replied Anna-Felicitas, “a judicious dilution of their blood by the right kind of mother.”

“Yes,” said Anna-Rose.  “Only to be found in England.”

This conversation didn’t take place till the afternoon of the next day, by which time Anna-Felicitas already knew about the human freight being Germans, for one of their own submarines came after the St. Luke and no one was quite so loud in expression of terror and dislike as the two Germans.

They demanded to be saved first, on the ground that they were Germans.  They repudiated their husbands, and said marriage was nothing compared to how one had been born.  The curtains of their berths, till then so carefully closed, suddenly yawned open, and the berths gave up their contents just as if, Anna-Felicitas remarked afterwards to Anna-Rose, it was the resurrection and the berths were riven sepulchres chucking up their dead.