The lady poked her nose over the top of the bed-clothes.

“Present the gentleman properly, Monica!” she said severely.

“Captain Okewood ...  Miss Mary Prendergast,” said Monica.

The lady’s head, pigtails and all, now appeared.  She appeared to be somewhat mollified.

“I can’t say I approve of your way of doing things, Monica,” she observed, but less severely than before, “and I can’t think what an English officer wants in my bedroom at ten minutes of two in the morning, but if those Deutschers want to find him, perhaps I can understand!”

Here she smiled affectionately on the beautiful girl at my side.

“Ah!  Mary, you’re a dear,” replied Monica.

“I knew you’d help us.  Why, a British officer in Germany ... isn’t it too thrilling?”

She turned to me.

“But, Des,” she said, “what do you want me to do?”

I knew I could trust Monica and I resolved I would trust her friend too... she looked a white woman all right.  And if she was a friend of Monica’s, her heart would be in the right place.  Francis and I had known Monica all our lives almost.  Her father had lived for years ... indeed to the day of his death ... in London as the principal European representative of a big American financial house.  They had lived next door to us in London and Francis and I had known Monica from the days when she was a pretty kid in short skirts until she had made her debut and the American ambassadress had presented her at Buckingham Palace.  At various stages of our lives, both Francis and I had been in love with her, I believe, but my life in the army had kept me much abroad, so Francis had seen most of her and had been the hardest hit.

Then the father died and Monica went travelling abroad in great state, as befits a young heiress, with a prodigiously respectable American chaperon and a retinue of retainers.  I never knew the rights of the case between her and Francis, but at one of the German embassies abroad—­I think in Vienna—­she met the young Count Rachwitz, head of one of the great Silesian noble houses, and married him.

It was not on the usual rock—­money—­that this German-American marriage was wrecked, for the Count was very wealthy himself.  I had supposed that the German man’s habitual attitude of mind towards women had not suited the girl’s independent spirit on hearing that Monica, a few years after her marriage, had left her husband and gone to live in America.  I had not seen her since she left London, and, though we wrote to one another at intervals, I had not heard from her since the war started and had no idea that she had returned to Germany.  Monica Rachwitz was, in fact, the last person I should ever have expected to meet in Berlin in war-time.