Only then, her excitement being over, does Mona realize what she has done for herself. The townspeople are surging out of the court-house, and, as they go, they are casting black looks at her. She awaits until she thinks they are gone, and then, venturing out, she finds a throng of them, women as well as men, on the steps and about the gate, and they fall on her with insults.
“Here she comes!” “The traitor!” “It’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest.” “The woman might have held her tongue, anyway; not given away her own countryman to save a dirty Boche.”
A hiss that is like the sound of water boiling over hot stones follows her down the street and out of the town, until she reaches the country.
Half-way home she is overtaken by the Commandant in his motor-car. He stops to speak to her, and his kind face looks serious, almost stern.
“I’m willing to believe that what you did was done in the interest of justice, but all the same I’m sorry for you, my girl, very sorry.”
The six prisoners have arrived at the camp before her, and a report of what she has done at the trial has passed with the speed of a forest fire over the five compounds. As she walks up the avenue, hardly able to support herself, the brutal sailors of the Second Compound, the same that had formerly offended her by their vulgar familiarity, rush to the barbed wire to lift their caps to her. She does not look at them, but hurries into the house, overwhelmed with shame and confusion.
To get through the work of the day is hard, and when night comes she drops into her father’s seat by the fire and sits there for hours, forgetting that she has eaten nothing since morning.
It is all over. The secret she has been struggling so hard to hide even from herself, denying it over and over again to her conscience, she has proclaimed aloud in public.
She loves this German—she who had hated all his race as no one else had ever hated them! Everybody knows it, too, and everybody loathes her. And her father—if she had killed her father before, as people said, she has killed him a second time that day, covering his very grave with disgrace.