“But how are we to live?” asked Vivie, with a catch in her throat.  “Our supply of Belgian money is coming to an end.  My mother has considerable funds invested in England.  These she can’t touch.  She has other sums in German securities, but soon after the War they stopped sending her the interest on the plea that she was an ‘enemy.’  As to the money we have in Belgium, the bank in Brussels can tell me nothing.  What are we to do?” The rather cold-mannered American diplomatist—­it was one of the Secretaries of Legation and he knew all about Mrs. Warren’s past, and regarded Vivie as an outlaw—­said he would try to communicate with her friends in England and see if through the American Relief organization, funds could be transmitted for their maintenance.  She gave him the addresses of Rossiter, Praed, and her mother’s London bankers.

Vivie now tried to settle down to a life of usefulness.  To increase their resources she gave lessons in English to Belgians and even to German officers.  She offered herself to various groups of Belgian ladies who had taken up such charities as the Germans permitted.  She also asked to be taken on as a Red Cross helper.  But in all these directions she had many snubs to meet and little encouragement.  Scandal had been busy with her name—­the unhappy reputation of her mother, the peculiar circumstances under which she had left England, the two or three months shut up at Tervueren with Colonel von Giesselin, and the very protection he now accorded her and her mother at the Hotel Imperial.  She felt herself looked upon almost as a pariah, except among the poor of Brussels in the Quartier des Marolles.  Here she was only regarded as a kind Englishwoman, unwearied in her efforts to alleviate suffering, mental and bodily.

And meantime, silence, a wall of silence as regarded England—­England which she was beginning to look upon as the paradise from which she had been chased.  Not a word had come through from Rossiter, from Honoria, Bertie Adams, or any of her Suffrage friends.  I can supply briefly what she did not know.

Rossiter at the very outbreak of War had offered his services as one deeply versed in anatomy and in physiology to the Army Medical Service, and especially to a great person at the War Office; but had been told quite cavalierly that they had no need of him.  As he persisted, he had been asked—­in the hope that it might get rid of him—­to go over to the United States in company with a writer of comic stories, a retired actor and a music-hall singer, and lecture on the causes of the War in the hope of bringing America in.  This he had declined to do, and being rich and happening to know personally General Armstrong (Honoria’s husband) he had been allowed to accompany him to the vicinity of the front and there put his theories of grafting flesh and bone to the test; with the ultimate results that his work became of enormous beneficial importance and he was given rank in the