[Footnote 1:  Street urchins of Brussels.  How they harassed the
  Germans and maddened them by mimicking their military manoeuvres!]

The doctor when he came pronounced her dead, thought it was probably an effusion of blood on the brain but couldn’t be certain till he had made an autopsy.

“What am I to do?” said Vivie thinking aloud....

“Why, stay here till all the formalities are over and you can find rooms elsewhere,” said Mme. Trouessart, the owner-servant of the tea-shop.  “I have another spare room.  For the moment my locataires are gone.  I know you both very well by sight, you were clients of ours in the happy days before the War.  Madame votre mere was, I think, the gerante of the Hotel Edouard-Sept when I first came to manage here.  Since then, you have often drunk my tea.  Je me nomme ‘Trouessart’ c’est le nom de mon mari qui est ... qui est—­Vous pouvez diviner ou il est, ou est a present tout Belge loyal qui peut servir.  Le nom Walcker?  C’etait le nom de nom pere, et de plus est, c’etait un nom Anglais transforme un peu en Flamand.  Mon arriere-grand-pere etait soldat Anglais.  Il se battait a Waterloo.  For me, I spik no English—­or ver’ leetle.”

She went on to explain, whilst the doctors occupied themselves with their gruesome task, and Vivie was being persuaded to take some nourishment, that her great grandfather had been a soldier servant who had married a Belgian woman and settled down on the site of this very shop a hundred years ago.  He and his wife had even then made a specialty of tea for English tourists.  She, his great grand-daughter, had after her marriage to Monsieur Trouessart carried on the business under the old name—­Walker, made to look Flemish as Walcker.

Vivie when left alone suddenly thought of the money question.  She remembered then that before going out to look for rooms she had transferred half the notes from their hiding-place to an inner pocket.  They were still there.  But what about her luggage and her mother’s, and the remainder of the money?  In her distress she wrote to Graefin von Stachelberg.  Minna came over from her hospital at half past six in the evening.  By that time the doctor had given the necessary certificate of the cause of death, and an undertaker had come on the scene to make his preparations.

Minna went over to the Hotel Imperial with Vivie.  Appearing in her Red Cross uniform, she was admitted, announced herself as the Graefin von Stachelberg, and demanded to know what justification the manager could offer for his extraordinary brutality towards these English ladies, the result of which had been the death of the elder lady.  The manager replied that inasmuch as the All Highest himself was to arrive that very evening to take up his abode at the Hotel Imperial, the hotel premises had been requisitioned, etc., etc.  He still refused absolutely to allow Vivie to proceed to her room and look for her money.  She might perhaps be allowed to do so when the Emperor was gone.  As to her luggage he would have it sent over to the tea-shop. (The money, it might be noted, she never recovered.  There were many things also missing from her mother’s trunks and no satisfaction was ever obtained.)