“Well?”
“I intend to write to him, telling him I shall soon be at liberty, and if you will only agree to go with me....”
He stops, seeing tears in her eyes. Then, in a husky voice, he says:
“I’m sorry to ask you to leave your island.”
“It is turning me out, Oskar; that’s the bitterest part of it.”
“Then you will go to England with me?”
“Yes,” she says, and he hurries off in high spirits to write his letter.
During the next week Mona tries hard to feel happy, but little by little vague doubts oppress her. One day she overhears scraps of a conversation between the Commandant and the Governor, who are arranging for the breaking up of the camp and the disposal of its portable property. As they stand in the avenue they are talking about the Peace Conference.
“It’s a pity,” the Commandant is saying, “but it has always been my experience that the first years of a peace are worse than the last years of a war.”
And the Governor is answering: “All the same, we should be fools to trust those traitors again. We have beaten the German brutes, and what we have got to do now is to keep them beaten.”