rious inasmuch as Anna, even now, when she had become an old
woman, would have nothing of what is in England called "help." She had
no wish to see a charwoman in _her_ kitchen. Fortunately for her, there
lay, just off and behind the kitchen, a roomy scullery, where most of
the dirty, and what may be called the smelly, work connected with
cooking was done.

To the left of the low-ceilinged, spacious, rather dark scullery was
Anna's own bedroom. Both the scullery and the servant's room were much
older than the rest of the house, for the picturesque gabled bit of
brown and red brick building which projected into the garden, at the
back of the Trellis House, belonged to Tudor days, to those spacious
times when the great cathedral just across the green was a new pride and
joy to the good folk of Witanbury.

As Anna stood at one of the kitchen windows, peeping out at the quiet
scene outside, but not drawing aside the curtain--for that she knew was
forbidden to her, and Anna very seldom consciously did anything she knew
to be forbidden--she felt far more unhappy and far more disturbed than
did Mrs. Otway herself.

This morning's news had stirred poor old Anna--stirred her more
profoundly than even her kind mistress guessed. Mrs. Otway would have
been surprised indeed had it been revealed to her that ever since
breakfast Anna had spent a very anxious time thinking over her own
immediate future, wondering with painful indecision as to whether it
were not her duty to go back to Germany. But whereas Mrs. Otway had the
inestimable advantage of being quite sure that she knew what it was best
for Anna to do, the old German woman herself was cruelly torn between
what was due to her mistress, to her married daughter, and, yes, to
herself.

How unutterably amazed Mrs. Otway would have been this morning had she
known that more than a month ago Anna had received a word of warning
from Berlin. But so it was: her niece had written to her, "It is
believed that war this summer there is to be. Willi has been warned that
something shortly will happen."

And now, as Anna stood there anxiously peeping out at the figure of her
mistress pacing up and down under the avenue of high elms across the
green, she did not give more than a glancing thought to England's part
in the conflict, for her whole heart was absorbed in the dread knowledge
that Germany was at war with terrible, barbarous Russia, and with
prosperous, perfidious France.

England