CHAPTER XXI

Long before, while Dimny was still practising her songs in California, sending her young voice lilting through the florid _vocalises_ of her Italian master, and schooling her fingers at the piano under the gentle tempers of her old German professor, her mother and sister had been caught and crushed by that other Germany from which the professor and millions of his kind had fled to American freedom. Shortly after Alice’s letter was started on its slow voyage to Dimny the German commandant at Dofnay had been driven f…