Page:Weird Tales volume 11 number 02.pdf/53

196 fluttered a moment before unveiling a pair of cornflower-blue eyes. "Oh, God of Heaven, I am lost—destroyed—hopelessly damned! Have mercy, Mary!" Her lovely eyes, wide and shining with terror, gazed wildly about the room a moment, came to rest on de Grandin as he bent over her, and closed in sharp nictitation. "Ach" she began again hysterically, but the Frenchman broke in, speaking slowly and mouthing the German words as though they had been morsels of overheated food on his tongue.

"Fräulein, you are with friends. We found you in trouble in the park a short time ago, and when you fainted we brought you here. If you will tell us where you live, or where you wish to go, we shall be very glad"

"Ach, ja, ja, take me"—the girl burst out wildly—"take me away; take me where he can not get me. Almighty God, what do I say? How can I, the hopelessly damned, escape him, either in life or death? Oh, wo me; wo me!" She knit her slender, nervous fingers together with a wringing, hopeless movement, turning her face to the wall and weeping bitterly.

De Grandin regarded her speculatively a moment, twisting first one, then the other end of his little blond mustache. "I think you would best be securing the restorative, Friend Trowbridge," he remarked; "she seems in great distress.

"Now, Mademoiselle," he held the tumbler of chilled water and ether to the sobbing girl's lips and patted her shoulder reassuringly, "you will have the kindness to drink this and compose yourself. Undoubtlessly you have had many troubles, but here you are safe"

"Safe, safe?" she echoed with a hysterical laugh. "I safe? There is no safety for me—no spot on earth or in hell where he can not find me, and since heaven is forever barred against me, how can I find safety anywhere?"

"Morbleu, Mademoiselle, I fear you distress yourself needlessly," the Frenchman exclaimed. "Who is this so mysterious 'he' who pursues you?"

"Mephistopheles!" So softly did she breathe the name that we could scarcely recognize the syllables.

"Eh? What is it you say?" de Grandin demanded.

"Mephistopheles—the Devil—Satan! I am possessed by him, sold and bound to him irrevocably through time and all eternity. Oh, miserable me! Alas, that ever I was born!"

She sobbed hysterically a moment, then regarded him with wide, piteous eyes. "You don’t believe me," she wailed. "No one believes me, they think I'm crazy, but"

"Mademoiselle," de Grandin interrupted, speaking with the sharp, incisive enunciation of a physician addressing a patient who refuses to control her nerves, "we have not said so. Only fools refuse to believe that which they do not understand, and Jules de Grandin is no fool. I have said it. If there is anything you would have us know, speak on, for we listen." He drew a chair up to the couch where the girl lay, and leaned toward her. "Proceed, Mademoiselle."

"My name is Mueller, Bertha Mueller," the girl answered, dabbing at her eyes with a wisp of lace and cambric. "I am from Vienna. A year ago I came here to accept a post as instructress to the children of Herr Andreas Hopfer, who represents the Deutsche-Botofabrik Verein."

"U'm," de Grandin commented.

"This new country was so strange to me," she continued, growing calmer with her recital; "nowhere, outside the house of my employer and a few of his friends, could I find anyone who spoke my mother tongue. I was lonesome. For comfort I used to sit in the park and watch the