"Did the Huns——?" Joey gasped.
"Yes, though she was just a tiny baby. We're never going to speak to a German again as long as we live," Rosie stated firmly. "We've settled that; we shall just look the other way if we meet one, as though he was a bad smell. Poor Tiddles!"
Tiddles had been staring at Joey very solemnly, all the time that Joey was looking at her arm. Now she suddenly laid down her black head upon Joey's shoulder. "I like you," she said.
Joey kissed the top of the little black head. "You're a darling! My father was killed by the Germans—at least by their being such beasts to him and all the other wounded men. They put him in a cattle-truck, and it was all filth, and they had no water, and when the women on the way heard they were English they wouldn't give them any, though they had heaps."
Joey stared through the bars of the grate, her eyes growing dim. "So father died, after a bit."
"Would you ever do anything for a German—except despise him?" another small girl asked truculently, and Joey answered:
"No, I don't suppose I should."
She scrambled up in a hurry. "Oh, my hanky's singeing!"
She was only just in time to save it, for the fire was really very hot. She snatched it from the fender and looked it over anxiously to see if there were any scorched places. No, there were none; but something rather strange caught her eyes in one corner; something that came between the neat red lettering of the Professor's name—some tiny marks that stood out oddly in bright yellow from the dark violet background.
Joey stared at them for a moment in silence, holding the handkerchief stretched to its widest in her two hands. They were photographed upon her mind in that moment before they faded and disappeared, leaving the red lettering of the Professor's name alone, and the handkerchief bone-dry. Curious marks they were too—marks that looked like little dots and dashes. Joey wondered for a second, and then she heard Noreen calling in the passage: