“Ermentrude, when you send me this little shoe—­See, I will leave one on and give you the other, I shall know that you are coming, or that you want the child.  My life is yours as I once promised, and do you think I would hold back the child?”

And again their hands met as once before, in that strong clasp, which means: 

“Trust me to the death and beyond it.”

* * * * *

With Antoinette it was to the death, as we have seen.  Warned by Ermentrude of the appalling results of their plan to bring father and child together, and entreated to fly lest her story should imperil the secret upon the preservation of which his very life now hung, she answered to the call as she had promised, and thus acquitted her debt though she failed to save him.

Of her previous act in disfiguring his photograph in her temporary lodging-place, we shall never know the full story.  The picture had been hers for years, given her by Ermentrude on their parting, so that the child should not be without some semblance of her father even if she should not know him as such, and it was to secure this clue to their now doubly dangerous secret that Madame Duclos ransacked her baggage previous to her flight from the New York hotel.  But whether its destruction in the peculiar manner we know was the result of simple precaution, or of a feeling of antagonism so strong against this destroyer of her beloved’s peace, that it had to be expended in some way before she felt strong enough for that supreme sacrifice in his favor toward which events seemed hurrying her, may be known in Eternity but will never be told in Time.

* * * * *

And Ermentrude?  What of her?  Alone, robbed of husband and child and friend—­where shall we look for her in this world of extreme tribulation?  Search the hospitals of France where they press closest to the trenches.  There will you find the woman who losing all has found much.  Blessing and blest! the angel of the battlefield whom the bullets spare since her work on earth is not yet accomplished!