The officer in command of the firing party shrugged his shoulders.  The soldier escort desisted from his attempts to blindfold the Englishman and stood aside, out of range.  Bertie fixed his glowing eyes on the woman he had loved from his youth up, the rifles rang out with a reverberating bellow, and he fell out of her sight, screened by the soldiers, a crumpled body over which they threw a sheet.

What happened then to Vivie?  I suppose you expect the time-worn trick of the weary novelist, anxious to put his pen down and go to his tea:  “Then she seemed swallowed up in a cloud of blackness and knew no more”—­till it was convenient to the narrator to begin a fresh chapter.  But with me it must be the relentless truth and nothing but the truth, in all its aspects.  Vivie was deafened, nearly stunned by the frightful noise of the volley in a confined space.  Next, she was being unceremoniously pushed out of the verandah, into the corridor, and so out into the snow-covered space in front of the brick building; whilst the officer was examining the dead body of the fallen man, ready to give the coup-de-grace, if he were not dead.  But he was.  Vivie was next conscious that she had the most dreadful, blinding headache she had ever known, and with it felt an irresistible nausea.  The prison Directeur was taking her hand and saying:  “Mademoiselle:  it is my duty to inform you that you are no longer under arrest.  You are free to return to your lodging.”  Minna von Stachelberg had come from somewhere and was taking her right arm, to lead her Brussels-ward; and Pasteur Walcker was ranging himself alongside to be her escort.  Unable to reply to any of them, she strode forward by herself to where under the snow lay an ill-kept grass plot, and there was violently sick.  The anaesthetics and soporifics of the last two days were having their usual aftermath.  After that came on a shuddering faintness and a rigor of shivers, under which her teeth clacked.  Some doctor came forward with a little brandy.  She put the glass to her lips, then pushed it aside, took Pasteur Walcker’s proffered arm, and walked towards the tram terminus.

Then they were in the tram, going towards the heart of Brussels.  How commonplace!  Fat frowsy market women got in—­or got out—­with their baskets; clerks entered with portfolios—­don’t they call them “serviettes"?—­under their arms; German policemen, Belgian gendarmes, German soldiers, a priest with his breviary came and went as though this Monday morning were like any other.  Vivie walked quite firmly and staidly from the tram halt to the Walckers’ house in the Rue Haute.  There she was met by Madame Walcker, who at a sign from her husband took her upstairs, silently undressed her and put her to bed with a hot water bottle and a cup of some hot drink which tasted a little of coffee.

After that Vivie passed three days of great sickness and nausea, a furred tongue, and positively no appetite.  Finally she arose a week after the execution and looked at herself in the mirror.  She was terribly haggard, she looked at least fifty-five—­“They must have taken me for his mother or his aunt; never for his sweetheart,” she commented bitterly to herself.  And her brown-gold hair was now distinctly a cinder grey.