He looked around as if instinctively to claim the sympathy of the policemen. To say he met with none would be to make them out more inhuman than they were. But as all this speech was in English they understood but little of what he had said. They guessed he loved the woman to whom he spake, but he may have been pleading with her not to give him away, to palliate his acts of espionage.
Vivie replied:
"Dear Bertie! You can't be gladder to see me than I am you. I greet you with all my heart. But you must be aware that in coming here like this you—" her words stuck in her throat—she knew not what to say lest she might incriminate him farther—
A police officer broke in on her embarrassment and said in German: "Es ist genug—You recognize him, Madame? He was arrested this morning at the Hotel Impérial, enquiring for you. Meantime, you also are under arrest. Please follow that officer."
"May I communicate with my friends?" said Vivie, with a dry tongue in a dry mouth.
"Who are your friends?"
"Gräfin von Stachelberg, at the Hôpital de St. Pierre; le Pasteur Walcker, Rue Haute, 33—"
"I will let them know that you are arrested on a charge of high treason—in league with an English spy," he hissed.
Then Vivie was pushed out of the room and Bertie was seized by two policemen—
They did not meet again for three days. It was a Saturday, and a police agent came into the improvised cell where Vivie was confined—who had never taken off her clothes since her arrest and had passed three days of such mental distress as she had never known, unable to sleep on the bug-infested pallet, unable to eat a morsel of the filthy food—and invited her to follow him. "By the grace of the military governor of the prison of Saint-Gilles"—he said this in French as she understood German imperfectly—"you are permitted to proceed there to take farewell of your English friend, the prisoner A-dams, who has been condemned to death."