"He's clapping quite a lot," Noreen explained, in a gusty whisper; and Joey, peering over her shoulder at the large, pallid face and the black moustache, saw that Noreen was quite right. The Professor was clapping as vigorously as Miss Craigie herself.
"It must be war-strain," said Joey, and they rang up the curtain on Scene II., which showed Anna or Anne in her dormitory at a girls' school, which appeared to consist in one other girl only and a superannuated mistress (Syb), whose aggressive spectacles did not seem much to assist her defective sight. She tottered up to say good-night to her pupils, calling Barbara out with her to unhook her dress, which opportunity was seized upon by Anna to mention in a brief soliloquy, that she was only waiting till her room-mate was asleep to steal out and introduce her father's germs (alternately alluded to as "flu-bugs" and "bubonic plague") into the neighbouring reservoir, this proceeding being the prelude to the abrupt departure of "Anne" from the English pig-dog boarding-school for good.
Barbara returned on the enunciation of this sentiment, and after a brief conversation with the obviously unsympathetic Anne about her brother—a prisoner in Germany—the two girls lay down in their dressing-gowns upon a sofa that was rather a tight fit for one, and fell instantly into sound stage slumber.
After a thrilling moment of silence, Anne rose up, lit a candle, held it close to the eyes of the slumbering Barbara, and remarking, "She sleeps, the English pig-dog. Ach Himmel! Now can I do what I will," she seized the Horlick's Malted Milk bottle, large size, which contained the germs, and stole out. She had hardly closed the door when Barbara sat up, crying, "Am I dreaming, or did she say pig-dog? If so, she is no English Anne, but a German spy among us. And what has she gone to do?"
The question was answered by a call from beneath the window at the back of the stage, and Barbara, dashing to it, called, "Jock! It's never you! Come up; I'm alone."
Joey, hoisted from below by Ingrid, appeared at the open window, with, triumph of realism, her hair and clothes wet, for it was raining; struggled through, with much display of thin legs, and said dramatically, "Has she loosed her bugs?"
The explanation that followed was a triumph of brevity, and brother and sister dashed out to try and cut Anne off before she reached the reservoir. The curtain fell, amid tumultuous applause, and a jovial request from Professor Trouville that they would be "vary careful not to drop the bottle and let zose fierce animals loose upon us."
The third scene required no preparation, and was brief indeed. The aged Head Mistress discovered asking frantically, of no one in particular, what can have happened to her pupils; to her enter Joey and Barbara, dragging between them Anne, defiant, and with the germ bottle torn from her hand—unopened.
The Highland officer explained the situation in two sentences, and Anne, in a superior German accent, mentioned that from her point of view to torture prisoners and let loose disease upon women and children were right and proper—because she was—Hoch! Hoch! a German!
Curtain, amid thunders of applause.