belonging to an old family in Bonn. Not a Prussian, therefore, but a Rhinelander, and without the Prussian arrogance of manner. Just before the war he had been at Oxford—Brasenose College—and spoke English perfectly, and loved England with a strange, deep, unconcealed sentiment.
"Loved England?" exclaimed Brand at this part of Eileen's tale.
"Why not?" asked Eileen. "I'm Irish, but I love England, in spite of all her faults, and all my grievances! Who can help loving England that has lived with her people?"
This Lieutenant von Kreuzenach was two months in Lille before he spoke a word with Eileen. She passed him often in the courtyard and always he saluted her with great deference. She fancied she noticed a kind of wistfulness in his eyes, as though he would have liked to talk to her. He had blue eyes, sad sometimes, she noticed, and a clean-cut face, rather delicate and pale.
One day she dropped a pile of books in the yard all of a heap, as he was passing, and he said, "Allow me," and helped to pick them up. One of the books was "Puck of Pook's Hill," by Kipling, and he smiled as he turned over a page or two.
"I love that book," he said, in perfect English. "There's so much of the spirit of old England in it. History, too. That's fine about the Roman wall, where the officers go pig-sticking."
Eileen O'Connor asked him if he were half English—perhaps he had an English mother?—but he shook his head and said he was wholly German—echt Deutsch.
He hesitated for a moment as though he wanted to continue the conversation, but then saluted and passed on.
It was a week or so later when they met again, and it
