Vivie then ventured to ask the bank clerk who had seen to her business if he had any news.
Looking cautiously round, he said the rumours going through the town were that the Queen of Holland, enraged that her Prince Consort should have facilitated the crossing of Limburg by German armies, had shot him dead with a revolver; that the Crown Prince of Germany, despairing of a successful end of the War, had committed suicide at his father's feet; that the American Consul General in Brussels--to whom, by the bye, Vivie ought to report herself and her mother, in order to come under his protection--had notified General Sixt von Arnim, commanding the army in Brussels, that, _unless he vacated the Belgian capital immediately_, England would bombard Hamburg and the United States would declare war on the Kaiser.

Alluring stories like these flitted through despairing Brussels during the first two months of German occupation, though Vivie, in her solitude at Tervueren, seldom heard them.
After her business at the bank she walked about the town.

No one took any notice of her or annoyed her in any way.

The restaurants seemed crowded with Belgians as well as Germans, and the Belgians did not seem to have lost their appetites.

The Palace Hotel had become a German officers' club.