sent to sound her. "You can say
that Anna Bauer a good mistress has, and knows when she well suited is."

She had said nothing of the matter to Mrs. Otway, but even so she
sometimes thought of that offer, and she often felt a little sore when
she reflected on the wages some of the easy-going servants who formed
part of the larger households in the Close received from their
employers.

Yet, in this all-important matter of money a stroke of extraordinary
good luck had befallen Anna--one of those things that very seldom come
to pass in our work-a-day world. It had happened, or perhaps it would be
truer to say it had begun--for, unlike most pieces of good fortune, it
was continuous--just three years ago, in the autumn of 1911, shortly
after her return from that glorious holiday at Berlin. This secret
stroke of luck, for she kept it jealously to herself, though there was
nothing about it at all to her discredit, had now lasted for over thirty
months, and it had had the agreeable effect of greatly increasing her
powers of saving. Of saving, that is, against the day when she would go
back to Germany, and live with her niece.

Mrs. Otway would have been surprised indeed had she known that Anna not
only meant to leave the Trellis House, but that, in a quiet, reflective
kind of way, she actually looked forward to doing so. Miss Rose would
surely marry, for a good many pleasant-mannered gentlemen came and went
to the Trellis House (though none of them were as rich as Anna would
have liked one of them to be), and she herself would get past her work.
When that had come to 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 wer