Vivie replied: 

“Dear Bertie!  You can’t be gladder to see me than I am you.  I greet you with all my heart.  But you must be aware that in coming here like this you—­” her words stuck in her throat—­she knew not what to say lest she might incriminate him farther—­

A police officer broke in on her embarrassment and said in German:  “Es ist genug—­You recognize him, Madame?  He was arrested this morning at the Hotel Imperial, enquiring for you.  Meantime, you also are under arrest.  Please follow that officer.”

“May I communicate with my friends?” said Vivie, with a dry tongue in a dry mouth.

“Who are your friends?”

“Graefin von Stachelberg, at the Hopital de St. Pierre; le Pasteur Walcker, Rue Haute, 33—­”

“I will let them know that you are arrested on a charge of high treason—­in league with an English spy,” he hissed.

Then Vivie was pushed out of the room and Bertie was seized by two policemen—­

They did not meet again for three days.  It was a Saturday, and a police agent came into the improvised cell where Vivie was confined—­who had never taken off her clothes since her arrest and had passed three days of such mental distress as she had never known, unable to sleep on the bug-infested pallet, unable to eat a morsel of the filthy food—­and invited her to follow him.  “By the grace of the military governor of the prison of Saint-Gilles”—­he said this in French as she understood German imperfectly—­“you are permitted to proceed there to take farewell of your English friend, the prisoner A-dams, who has been condemned to death.”

Bertie had been tried by court-martial in the Senate, on the Friday.  He followed all the proceedings in a dazed condition.  Everything was carried on in German, but the parts that most concerned him were grotesquely translated by a ferocious-looking interpreter, who likewise turned Bertie’s stupid, involved, self-condemnatory answers into German—­no doubt very incorrectly.  Bertie however protested, over and over again, that Miss Warren knew nothing of his projects, and that his only object in posing as an American and travelling with false passports was to rescue Miss Warren from Brussels and enable her to pass into Holland, “or get out of the country some ’ow.”  As to the Emperor, and taking his life—­“why lor’ bless you, I don’t want to take any one’s life.  I ’ate war, more than ever after all I’ve seen of it.  Upon my honour, gentlemen, all I want is Miss Warren.”  Here one member of the court made a facetious remark in German to a colleague who sniggered, while, with his insolent light blue eyes, he surveyed Bertie’s honest, earnest face, thin and hollowed with privations and fatigue....