“How can I unsay what is the fact?” he answered savagely. “Do not be a stupid fool! You ought to be glad you performed such a deed for the Fatherland.”
“Not Mr. Jervis Blake,” she wailed out. “Not the bridegroom of my child!”
“The bridegroom of your child was engaged in killing good Germans; and now he will never kill any Germans any more. And it is you, Frau Bauer, who shot off his foot. If you betray me, all that will be known, and they will not deport you, they will hang you!”
To this she said nothing, and he touched her roughly on the shoulder. “Look up, Frau Bauer! Look up, and tell me that you understand! It is important!”
She looked up, and even he was shocked, taken aback, by the strange look on her face. It was a look of dreadful understanding, of fear, and of pain. “I do understand,” she said in a low voice.
“If you do what I tell you, nothing will happen to you,” he exclaimed impatiently, but more kindly than he had yet spoken. “You will only be sent home, deported, as they call it. If you are thinking of your money in the Savings Bank, that they will not allow you to take. But without doubt your ladies will take care of it for you till this cursed war is over. So you see you have nothing to fear if you do what I tell you. So now good-bye, Frau Bauer. I’ll go and tell them that you know nothing, that I have been not able to get anything out of you. Is that so?”
“Yes,” she answered apathetically.
Giving one more quick look at her bowed head, he went across and knocked loudly at the cell door.
There was a little pause, and then the door opened. It opened just wide enough to let him out.
And then, just for a moment, Alfred Head felt a slight tremor of discomfort, for the end of the passage, that is, farther down, some way past Anna’s cell, now seemed full of men. There stood the chief local police inspector and three or four policemen, as well as the gentleman from London.