pass she would go and live with her niece in Berlin.
She had not told her daughter of this arrangement,
and it had been spoken of by Willi and her niece more
as a joke than anything else; still, Anna generally
managed to carry through what she had made up her
mind to accomplish.

But on this August morning, standing there by the
kitchen window of the Trellis House, the future was
far from good old Anna's mind. Her mind was fixed
on the present. How tiresome, how foolish of England
to have mixed up with a quarrel which did
not concern her! How strange that she, Anna Bauer,
in spite of that word of warning from Berlin, had
suspected nothing!

As a matter of fact Mrs. Otway had said something
to her about Servia and Austria -- something, too,
more in sorrow than in anger, of Germany "rattling
her sword." But she, Anna, had only heard with
half an ear. Politics were out of woman's province.
But there! English ladies were like that.

Many a time had Anna laughed aloud over the
antics of the Suffragettes. About a month ago the
boy who brought the meat had given her a long
account of a riot -- it had been a very little one --
provoked by one such lady madwoman in the market-place
of Witanbury itself. In wise masculine Germany
the lady's relatives (for, strange to say, the
Suffragette in question had been a high-born lady)
would have put her in the only proper place for her,
an idiot asylum.

Anna had been genuinely shocked and distressed on
learning that her beloved nursling, Miss Rose, secretly
rather sympathised with this mad female wish for a

[[32]]

p031 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p032w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p033

v?