Hildegarde was filled with an intense curiosity to see the man who had tamed and trapped her father. The thing had happened so unexpectedly, and she had followed the conversation with such interest, that she had not had time to consider other than the immediate aspects of it. She did not yet consider her father as a traitor to his country, nor go deeply into the meaning of the words she had overheard. But she did want to see that man. She took a careful step forward, and another. She would peer through the door and then withdraw.
She took one more step; then something descended over her head, a hand covered her mouth, and she was lifted bodily from her feet. There was no sound. Whoever had seized her carried her silently to the stairs, up to the second floor, opened a door, and set her within. The door closed quickly, the key turned on the outside, and she was free and alone. She snatched the cloth from her head. It was her own room!
She placed her hand against the door to steady herself while she collected her senses. Who had seized her? Not her father, not the stranger. It had been no man of her father’s who had done so. It must have been some one in the service of the stranger, but some one employed in the von Essen household; some one familiar with it; some one who knew without hesitation where her own room was. It was startling, terrifying. She tottered across to her bed and threw herself upon it, nerves aflutter. Hildegarde was not given to nerves, but the tenseness of her situation as she had stood listening to her father and the stranger, with its unexpressed threat of danger, then the sudden, stifling, paralyzing climax of her seizure by unseen hands, had been sufficient to shock steadier fortitude than her own.
She did not give way to hysterics; did not whimper with fear as some girls might have done. The strange thing is that she was not afraid. It was not fear she felt so much as bewilderment, a certain dread of the unknown, a sense of something sinister impending.
She lay quietly struggling for self-control, and gradually it came to her. She sat up and looked about her. Then she went to her door and tried it. It was not locked. This was startling, for she had heard distinctly the key turned in the lock. Whoever had placed her in her room had crept back to unlock the door.
She tried to consider the events calmly, first in their bearing upon herself. She had been caught eavesdropping, effectively interrupted, but not more ungently than the circumstances had demanded. She had not been hurt; apparently there was neither desire nor intention to hurt her.... As yet. But she had heard matters not safe to overhear. Possibly her assailant knew how much she had overheard; possibly he had come upon her suddenly and had acted as suddenly. In that event he would not know how long she had been there nor what she knew. That would make for safety. Somehow that phase did not worry her.
Then she reviewed the conversation at which she had been an unseen auditor. Its meaning was plain to her. Her father was in communication with sinister agencies, was now the tool of such agencies. She had known him to be frantically pro-German, but that he had been an active participant in the plots and propaganda which filled the papers and which people were coming to understand daily as more and more of a menace to the well-being of their country, she had not imagined. And now Herman von Essen was to go farther; he was, so to speak, initiated into the inner ring of German intrigue, that inner ring commissioned by a conscienceless power to carry out unspeakable designs against a friendly, unsuspicious people! In short, she was the daughter of a traitor; of the same blood that flowed in the veins of a man plotting treason against the flag under which he had lived and prospered and to which his allegiance had been sworn.... She had hated her father before, she despised him now. She was filled with shame, deep, bitter, biting shame....
She asked herself what ought she to do, what could she do? She hated Germany because she believed it was Germany that had produced her father and his like. Because she had heard disloyal talk from her father’s lips, she had become impetuously, girlishly loyal to the United States.... But in the condition that faced her, what could she do? Where lay her duty? It was a question too complex for her immaturity. She answered it by avoiding it. Her determination was the determination she had reached earlier in the day—to go away. Now her going away took on a new significance. It took on the quality of running away to avoid responsibility, to avoid answering a question to which she could see no answer.
Once more she put on her coat and hat and crept out into the dark hall. The clock had struck midnight. This time she reached the outer door without interruption, shot back its bolt, and stepped out into the night. She ran to the street, fearful lest she should be stopped even now, and felt a great surge of relief as she dropped her note to Potter Waite into the mail-box. Then she turned, and with as great caution made her way back to her room, locked the door—a thing she had never been accustomed to do—and retired.