So there was Vivie, one dismal, rainy November evening in 1915; homeless, her mother lying dead in a room of this tea-shop, and in her own pocket only a matter of thirty thousand francs to provide for her till the War was over.  A thousand pounds in fluctuating value was all that was left of a nominal twenty thousand of the year before.

But the financial aspect of the case for the time being did not concern her.  The death of her mother had been a stunning shock, and when she crossed over to the hotel—­what irony, by the bye, to think she had been born there thirty-nine years ago, in the old inn that had preceded the twice rebuilt hotel!—­when she crossed the street with Minna, it had been with blazing, tearless eyes and the desire to take the hotel manager and his minions by the coat collar, fling them into the street, and assert her right to go up to her room.  But now her violence was spent and she was a broken, weeping woman as she sat all night by the bedside of her dead mother, holding the cold hand, imprinting kisses on the dead face which was now that of a saintly person with nothing of the reprobate in its lineaments.

* * * * *

The burial for various reasons had to take place in the Cemetery of St. Josse-ten-Noode, near the shuddery National Shooting Range where Edith Cavell and numerous Belgian patriots had recently been executed.  Minna von Stachelberg left her hospital, with some one else in charge, and insisted on accompanying Vivie to the interment.  This might have been purely “laic”; not on account of any harsh dislike to the religious ceremony on Vivie’s part; only due to the fact that she knew no priest or pastor.  But there appeared at the grave-side to make a very suitable and touching discourse and to utter one or two heartfelt prayers, a Belgian Baptist minister, a relation of Mme. Trouessart.

Waterloo left many curious things behind it.  Not only a tea-shop or two; but a Nonconformist nucleus, that intermarried, as Sergeant Walker or Walcker had done, with Belgian women and left descendants who in the third generation—­and by inherent vigour, thrift, matrimony and conversion—­had built up quite a numerous congregation, which even grew large enough and rich enough to maintain a mission of its own in Congoland.  Kind Mme. Trouessart (nee Walcker), distressed and unusually moved at the sad circumstances of Mrs. Warren’s death, had called in her uncle the Baptist pastor (who also in some unexplained way seemed to hold a brief for the Salvation Army).  He prayed silently by the death-bed which, under the circumstances, was more tactful than open intercession.  He helped greatly over all the formalities of the funeral, and he took upon himself the arrangement of the ceremony, so that everything was done decorously, and certainly to the satisfaction of the Belgians, who attended.  Such people would be large-minded in religion—­you might be Protestant, if you were not Catholic, or you might be Jewish; but a funeral without some outward sign of faith and hope would have puzzled and distressed them.