Eileen O'Connor, said the Reverend Mother, who was to be called as a witness on her behalf, bowed in a gracious way to the President, but with a look of amusement that was amazing to the German officers assembled for her trial. Some of them scowled, but there were others, the younger men, who whispered, and smiled also with no attempt to disguise their admiration of such courage.
"Perhaps it was only I," said the Reverend Mother, "who understood the child's joyous relief which gave her this courage. I had waited with terrible dread for the announcement of the discovery of the secret passage. That it had been discovered I knew, for the German lieutenant, Franz von Kreuzenach, had come round to me and very sternly questioned me about a case of medicine which he had found there, stamped with the name of our convent."
"Then," I said, "this Franz von Kreuzenach must have suppressed some of the evidence. By what motive"
The Reverend Mother interrupted me, putting her hand on my sleeve with a touch of protest.
"The good God works through strange instruments, and may touch the hardest heart with His grace. It was indeed a miracle."
I would give much to have been in that court at Lille when Eileen O'Connor was permitted to question the German lieutenant who was the chief witness against her.
From what I have heard, not only from the Reverend Mother, but from other people of Lille who were present at the trial, she played with this German officer, making him look very foolish, ridiculing him in a merry, contemptuous way before the Court. Indeed he seemed strangely abashed before her.
"The cypher!. . . Have you ever been a schoolboy, or were you born a lieutenant in the German Army?"
