“Then,” I said, “this Franz von Kreuzenach must have suppressed some of the evidence. By what motive——”
The Reverend Mother interrupted me, putting her hand on my sleeve with a touch of protest.
“The good God works through strange instruments, and may touch the hardest heart with His grace. It was indeed a miracle.”
I would give much to have been in that Court at Lille when Eileen O’Connor was permitted to question the German lieutenant, who was the chief witness against her.
From what I have heard, not only from the Reverend Mother, but from other people of Lille who were present at the trial, she played with this German officer, making him look very foolish, ridiculing him in a merry, contemptuous way before the court. Indeed, he seemed strangely abashed before her.
“The cypher!... Have you ever been a schoolboy, or were you born a lieutenant in the German Army?”
Franz von Kreuzenach admitted that he had once been a boy—to the amusement of his brother officers.
Had he ever read stories of adventure, fairy tales, romances, or did he spend his childhood in the study of Nietzsche, Haegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, Goethe, von Bemhardi, Karl Marx———-
When she strung off these names—so incongruous in association—even the President permitted a slight smile to twist his thin hard mouth.
Franz von Kreuzenach said that he had read some fairy tales and stories of adventure. Might he ask the gnadiges Fraulein——