"You can walk well, yes?" he said, as they turned in the direction of the Isar.

"In this skirt," she laughed, glancing down at her costume whose original foundations had been laid for golf, "in this skirt I am equal to anything!"

"But if you slip?" he supposed, anxiously.

"You ought to see the soles of my boots. I sent them to the little shoemaker in the Wurzerstrasse and he soled them with rubber half an inch thick."

"How much is an inch?" he asked.

"Twice the width of the rubber on my boots."

"No, but earnestly," he said, "is it a centimetre?"

"Two centimetres and a half make one inch."

"You are droll, you English and Americans," he said, "you see nothing but your own way. I have heard Englishmen laugh as to how yet the Russians count their time different from the civilization part of the world, and then all England and America do their measure and weight in a manner so uneven that a European is useless to even attempt to understand it. There was a man there at Lucerne,—what did he say to me? 'A mark is a quarter, is it not?' that is what he asked. 'Mon Dieu,' I said, 'if you cut it in four pieces it is four quarters, and if you leave it whole it is whole,' then he looked to find me bete, and I was very sure that he was, and we spoke no more."

Rosina laughed.

"He meant a quarter of a dollar," she explained.

"I know that. You do not really think that I did not know that, do you? It was for his poor careless grammar that I find the American even more bete than for his ignorance. Do you believe that in my own tongue I would speak as many of you speak yours? In my own tongue I am above correction."

They were under the long arcade in front of the Regierung and in view of the discussion which seemed impending she judged it advisable to say, with a gesture:

"There is where we met Jack; you remember?"

Von Ibn looked quickly about.

"Yes, it was here," he said, and then he shuddered slightly. "It was very well to laugh after, but that might have been so bad. I was angry and I struck a fearful blow then; I have often think of it when we were travelling together."

She grew thoughtful also, and her imagination found food among some miserable possibilities which might have been.

So they came to the river banks and the Maximilianbrucke, and paused by its rail.

The air was grand, fresh and moist, reminiscent of summer's breath while also prophetic of winter's bite, and the Isar swept below them, carrying its hurry of tumult away, away, far into the west, towards a wealth of rose and golden sky. Between the glory and the water, in the middle distance, lay a line of roofs stretching irregularly into the blackness of their own shadows, and beyond them was the forest, to the fringing haze of whose bare branches the distance lent a softness not their own. The banks of the Promenade were still green, but the masses of vine that trailed in the green ripples were all of a crimson or reddish brown, and the shrubs showed here and there an echo of the same color.

It was beautiful and wonderful to see, and they stood still and feasted their eyes for some long minutes.

"Oh, Isar," Rosina cried softly, holding her hand out towards the singing waters below, "when shall I see you again?"

"You will return some day," her companion said hopefully.

"Who can tell?"

"But always you must come over some bridge to return to-night."

She felt that such levity jarred upon her mood, and refused to return his smile. She did not like him to feel like smiling too often these days.

"Do not be of a bad humor," he entreated. "I am this afternoon of such a good one; and how can you know that you will not return? A woman can never be decided, so you may very well see the Isar soon again. Vous comprenez?"

"Is it being bad-humored to be sad?" she asked; "and why can't I be decided if I want to be?"

"Because," he said, wisely, "you are a woman; and a woman is very foolish to ever be decided, for she always changes her mind; and then all her decided seems to have been quite useless."

Rosina felt that this sentence called for study before reply, and so walked on without speaking.

"Is that not so?" he asked, as they went down by the little stone stair.

"I never change."

"Oh, now you know well that you do not speak the truth,—you are so very changeable. This afternoon, par exemple, when I first come to ask you to go out, you say you cannot of any possibility make it, and then, very suddenly, we go."

"But I recollected that I might wear this skirt."

"And there was that lady, also," he said thoughtfully.

"Yes, she was there, too."

"But always you did change."

"I don't call it being changeable when one has a good reason for so doing."

He stopped short; and she, after going a few steps further, discovered herself to be unaccompanied and stopped also.

"What is the matter?"

"Suddenly, I think."

"Can't you walk and think at the same time?"

He smiled, and came up with her again.

"If I make you a good reason—" he began, and then hesitated and was silent.

They followed the muddy path almost to the Luitpoldbrucke before he continued his phrase.

"If one can change for a good reason, and if I make you a good reason, then will you change about me?"

She drew a quick little breath.

"I can't change in that way," she said; "you know that I do not want to marry again: marriage is too awful an undertaking. Don't you see that even now it does not make you always happy to be around me—"

"I am never around you," he exclaimed indignantly. "I never have hardly touch you. I have been with you not as a man, but as an angel. Je me comporte comme un ange—comme un ange—c'est moi qui vous le dit! I have given you one kiss such as a small baby might give its mother, and that is all;—and then you say that I am always around you."

He ceased speaking, and looked straitly and darkly before him. She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

"I tell you," he continued violently after a short interval, "I am very much too good. Whatever you bid me do, that I do. Whatever you bid me not do, that I do not. And you do not thank me, or trust me, or treat me as a friend. Vous avez toujours peur de moi. When I approach you, you have always the air to expect that I will displease you. Have I deserved that? Have I behaved badly once? Did I kiss you when you knew nothing and I held you there in the mud—the night when I lose my umbrella? Mon Dieu, you are very drole, if you have known many men and do not appreciate me."

He stopped as if choked.

They had passed beyond the bridge and entered upon a path along the river bank, a path bordered with willow trees. The sky was more brilliantly gorgeous than ever, but under foot it was wet indeed.

"Try not to stamp so much as you walk," she asked him very gently; "you keep splashing me."

"What is splash?" he demanded gloomily; "something that annoys your ears?"

"No, something that spoils my boots."

"I do not care if I spoil those boots; I find them most ugly."

"Perhaps; but I could not be here but for them."

He walked on with somewhat less vigor.

"Let us talk about us," he suggested, presently.

"With reference to what?"

"To me."

"No, no," she said unwillingly.

"Yes; why not?"

"You always come back to that same subject; your mind appears to follow a circuit, like a squirrel in a ring."

"'Wheel,' you mean."

"Well, 'wheel,' then."

"What squirrel? We never have talked of a squirrel before."

Rosina's laugh rang out among the willows.

"Decidement vous n'etes pas du tout poli," he cried angrily. "You say I am like a squirrel; I ask what squirrel, and you begin to laugh."

"I never said that you were like a squirrel," she exclaimed, greatly shocked; "how can you think that I would say such a thing?"

"You did," he declared bitterly. "You said I was like a squirrel in his wheel, because I tell you so often that I love you."

"Oh, monsieur, you know that I never meant it in that way; how can you think for an instant that I could have—have said that—that—" She felt it impossible to define her offence again without having the corners of her mouth give way; but she went close beside him and faced his vexation with earnest, upraised eyes the while that she laid one hand upon his arm with the sweet impulsive gesture of a pleading child.

The gold had all faded from the sky, and the pink reflection in the far west was sunk beyond the horizon. The path was very solitary; they were quite alone except for an occasional peasant returning from his labor.

"Say that you understand," she said anxiously, as a break in the trees revealed a long stretch of river; "you must say something, because I want to know how far it is to the next bridge."

He stopped and stared ahead.

"There are no more bridges," he proclaimed.

"No more bridges," she cried.

He shook his head.

"Must we go the whole way back along this same muddy path?"

"Yes, surely."

She turned.

"Then let us go back now. There is no fun walking any further this way after the sunset is over."

"Is it for the sunset alone that you walk?"

"What shall I say?" she asked, looking up at him.

"Say that you walk for me."

"And then what follows?"

"I follow."

They laughed together.

"I am so good to you," he declared; "even when you laugh at me I am never angry. I am truly so very good."

He appeared so well content with himself that they went the whole distance to the Peace Monument before she disturbed his placid introspection. There was a pleasure to her in simply walking beside him in silence; it was a sensation which she had never attempted to analyze, but its existence had become a part of her own.

"Do not let us go home," he proposed suddenly, when her turning to cross the Luitpoldbrucke recalled him to himself; "let us go somewhere and dine alone together. It is perhaps the last time; Jack returns to-morrow."

"Oh, let us," she agreed delightedly; but then her voice altered suddenly for the worse. "No, it's impossible," she said sadly, "I can't go to a cafe and dine in this short skirt."

"Why can you not?"

"Can't you see why?"

He walked off some ways to the side and gazed critically at her skirt.

"Yes," he said, rejoining her, "I can see why."

They were halfway across the bridge; he laid his hand on her arm and stopped her.

"Je vous ferai un propos," he said eagerly; "we will take a car going to the Ostbahnhof, and then we will leave it at a quiet place and seek a quiet cafe and dine there."

"All right," she said; "but you must telephone to the pension, or they won't know what has become of me."

"I can say that we are gone to the theatre," he suggested.

"They won't believe that because of this skirt."

"I will say we are gone too far and must send for a cab, and will eat while we wait."

"I think that whatever you say will sound like a lie, so it doesn't really matter."

"Then I will say that we do not return until after the supper, and nothing else."

"Where will you telephone from?"

"From the cafe. Where would I telephone from?"

Rosina looked vaguely around in the darkness.

"We are only three or four blocks from the pension now, are we not?"

He glanced about.

"It will be droll if we meet some one you know."

"Yes," she said coldly; "it will be very funny—like Mrs. Jones to-day."

"I am quite vexed when she came in," he said seriously; "why do people come in like that?"

"We'll be just as thoughtless when we're her age," Rosina said charitably. "I think myself that it is astonishing that so many young people manage to get betrothed when there are so many old people to keep coming in."

"Getting betrothed is very simple," said Von Ibn, "because always the young girl is willing; but when she is a young widow and not willing, that is what is difficult, and makes Mrs. Jones de trop."

She was obliged to laugh.

They were come to the Maximiliansstrasse, and a car was making its way jerkily around the corners of the monument in the middle of the square. It was a car for the Ostbahnhof, and full—very full.

"Let it go by," he said. "We will walk on and another comes in a moment."

They let it pass, and wandered on towards the rushing river.

"You see why it was so foolish to be sad," he remarked, as they approached the bridge; "here is the second time that you have seen the Isar since you weep good-bye forever this afternoon."

"I didn't weep," she said indignantly.

"Did you not? I thought that you did."

They waited for another car at the end of the bridge; the island where the Isarlust sports its lights and music all summer, looked particularly deserted in the contrast of this October night. She spoke of the fact.

"You were often there?" he asked; "yes?"

"Yes, very often."

"With who?"

She smiled a little in the dark.

"We used to come in the evenings," she said; "every one used to come."

Another car approached—again crowded.

"Let us walk," she suggested; "all the cars will be crowded for the next hour."

"Will your feet go further?" he inquired anxiously.

"Yes, I think so."

They turned their faces to that gardened slope which rises to the right of the Maximilianeum. The full moon was coming up behind the stately building, and its glorious open arches were outlined against the evening sky. The great tower which rose at the end near them seemed to mount straight upward into heaven itself.

"I don't want to leave the Maximilianeum," she exclaimed, reft with an intense admiration for the grandeur of what was before her; "I don't want to leave the Bavarian moon; oh, I don't want to leave Munich; not a bit."

"And me?" said her companion, taking her arm, "do you want to not leave me also?"

"I don't want to leave you either," she declared. "I don't want to leave anything, and I must leave everything. Oh," she exclaimed suddenly and viciously, "I wish I might know who it was that wrote home to Uncle John."

"But you have thought to know?"

"Oh, I'm almost sure that it was that man in Zurich."

"He was not so bad, that Zuricher man," he said, reflectively. "Did I ever say to you that I did go to the Gare with him when he went to Lucerne?"

"No, you never told me that. What did you go to the station with him for?"

"I thought that I would know whether after all he really went to Constance. At the Gare, after he has bought his ticket for Lucerne, I find him most agreeable."

"Did you really think that perhaps he was going to Constance?"

"Yes, I did. I find it very natural that he shall want to go to Constance. I am surprise that day at every one who can decide to go any other place because I so wish to get to Constance myself. Vous comprenez?"

She was obliged to smile audibly.

"It was very funny the way that you came into the Insel salle-a-manger that night. I never was more surprised in my life."

"I like to come to you that way," he went on. "When you are so your face becomes glad and I believe that you have been really lonely for me and—"

He stopped suddenly; two big electric lights loomed at the corner to their right and the scene which was revealed by the uncurtained state of the window was responsible for the sudden turn of the current of his thoughts.

"We can eat there," he exclaimed.

She stopped, astonished.

"Can we?" she asked. "I wouldn't think so."

"But surely yes," he affirmed; "it is a cafe."

He flung the door open as he spoke and stood back to let her pass inside.

"It is a little smoky," he continued, as the door fell to, "but—"

"A little!" she interrupted.

"But what does that do to you? and there is another lady, so it is very right for you to be here too."

"She doesn't look like a lady to me," said Rosina, dodging under a billiard-cue, for in this particular cafe the centre of the room is occupied by the billiard-tables; "she looks decidedly otherwise."

Von Ibn glanced carelessly at the person alluded to.

"It is always a woman," he remarked; and then he led the way around to a vacant corner where there was somewhat less confusion than elsewhere. "Here you may sit down," he commanded, and laid aside his own hat and overcoat.

She obeyed him, contemplating her surroundings with interest as she began to unbutton her gloves.

For the place was, to her eyes, unique of its kind, her lot having been cast hitherto in quite another class of cafes. It was very large, and decidedly hideous, wainscoted in imitation panels and frescoed in imitation paintings. The columns which supported the ceilings were brilliantly banded in various colors and flowered out below their pediments into iron branches of oak leaves among which blossomed the bulbs of many electric lights. By each column stood a severely plain hat-rack. In the middle of the room were four billiard tables, around its sides numberless small marble-topped stands where beer was being served galore. Against the walls were fastened several of those magnificent mirrors which testify so loudly to the reasonable price of good glass in that happy land across the seas; each mirror was flanked by two stuffed eagles, and decorated above its centre with one ornate quirl in gilt and stucco. And the whole was full and more than full of smoke.

Von Ibn rapped on the tiled floor with his umbrella, and a waitress serving at a table near, five beer-mugs in each hand, nodded that she heard. Then he turned to Rosina:

"Eh bien!"

"I never was in a place like this before."

"You may very likely never be in such a one again," he told her seriously; "so you must be as happy as you can while you're here."

"That reason for having a good time hadn't occurred to me," she answered, giving him back his smile.

"Then think to occur it now," he rejoined.

The waitress had by this time gotten rid of her ten mugs and came to them, beginning proceedings by spreading the menu down on the table and running her pencil through item after item.

"You had better order before everything is gone," Rosina suggested.

"I must think the same," he replied, and took up the menu.

"Haben Sie bouillon?" he demanded immediately.

The waitress signified that bouillon was not to be.

"How shall I do?" he asked, looking blank. "In all my life I have never eat without a bouillon before?"

Rosina and the waitress felt their mutual helplessness in this difficulty, and the proceedings in hand came to a standstill natural under the circumstances.

"Can't they make you some?" the American brain suggested.

He turned the idea over in his mind once or twice and then:

"No," he said; "it is not worth. It will be better that we eat now, and later, when I am in town, I will get a bouillon."

So, that difficulty being disposed of, he ordered a species of repast with an infinite sense of amusement over the bill of fare. The waitress then retired and they were left alone in their corner.

"The other lady is getting kissed," Rosina said. The publicity of a certain grade of continental love-making is always both interesting and amazing to the Anglo-Saxon temperament.

He looked behind him without at all disturbing what was in progress there. After a minute's quiet stare he turned back in his seat and shrugged his shoulders.

"You see how simple it is when the woman is still," he said pointedly. "There is no fainting there; he loses no seventeen-mark umbrella from Baden-Baden."

She ignored the gist of this remark, and began to unhook the collar of her jacket. Then she decided to take it off altogether.

"You find it too warm?" he said, rising to assist her.

"I certainly do."

"It is curious for you and I to be in such a place, n'est-ce pas?"

"Very curious."

"But it is an experience, like eating in the woods."

"I don't think that it is at all like eating in the woods; I think that nothing could be more different."

"We are so alone."

"Oh!"

"Now you understand what I mean."

"Yes, now I understand what you mean. And it is really a little like the woods, too," she added. "Those iron acorns and leaves are the branches, and the stuffed eagles are the birds."

He looked at the oak-branches and the eagles for some time, and then he said:

"Let us talk."

"What are we doing now?"

"We are waiting for what is to be to eat."

"I thought that that in itself was always sufficient entertainment for a man."

"I like better to talk. I have not much time more to talk with you, vous savez."

"We will talk," she said, hastily. Her eyes wandered vaguely over the room seeking a subject for immediate discussion; all that she saw was the perpendicular cue of one of the billiard players.

"Watch!" she exclaimed. "He's going to make an awfully difficult shot."

Von Ibn looked towards the player with very little interest depicted on his countenance.

"Oh, he missed," she exclaimed disgustedly.

"But of course. How could a man like that do such a masse? You are so hopeful ever. You say, 'See him make so difficult a play,' when only looking upon the man's face tells that he himself is sure that he is about to fail."

"I'll give you a riddle," she went on, receiving his expostulation with a smile. "But perhaps you don't know what a riddle is?" she added questioningly.

"Yes, I do know what a riddle is; it is what you do not know and must tell."

"Yes, that is it."

"And your riddle is?"

"Why am I like a dragon?"

"Like a—" he faltered.

"Dragon."

"What is a dragon?"

"It's a horrible monster. Don't you know the picture in the Schaak Gallery of that creature running its neck out through the slit in the rock so as to devour the two donkeys?"

"Yes, I know the picture. But that creature is blue."

"Oh," she said hopelessly, "it's no use trying to tell you riddles, you don't understand."

"Yes, I do," he cried eagerly. "I understand perfectly and I assure you that I like very much. Dragon is 'drachen,' n'est ce pas?"

"Yes."

"And you are as one?"

"I ask why am I like one?"

He looked particularly blank.

"You are perhaps hungry?" he hazarded.

She began to laugh.

"No, it's because I'm breathing smoke."

"Do dragons breathe smoke? It is a salamander you are believing in."

"In pictures dragons always breathe smoke and fire."

"But there is no fire here."

"There must be somewhere, because there is so much smoke."

He was unmoved and ruminative.

"I do not find your riddle very clever," he said at last.

Rosina buried the poor, weak, little scintillation at once and stamped on its grave in hot haste.

"I think that our dinner is coming," she announced presently, turning her veil above her brows, "and I am so hungry."

"I find your hunger a much better answer of that riddle than to be breathing smoke," he said.

"Of course you do, because that is the answer that you thought of."

The waitress began to arrange the dishes upon the table and when all was in order he prepared to serve them both.

"I often start to say most clever things," he said, as he carved the fish, "but before I can speak you have always say something else."

She took the plate that he passed her, and picked up her fork at once.

"Then when you are silent for a quarter of an hour or so it would really pay me to keep still and wait; wouldn't it?" she inquired.

He took a mouthful and deliberated.

"I think so," he said at last.

A deep stillness fell over the festal board. Von Ibn was mute and his companion felt that, the preceding remarks considered, she would be dumb herself. The entire meal was accordingly eaten in absolute silence, until, when she had finished, she could not refrain from stealing one amused glance in his direction.

"You laugh," he said, returning the smile in kind.

"I am sure that it is going to be something very brilliant this time," she told him.

He stared for a minute; and then he understood and laughed aloud.

"I only eat then," he exclaimed, "mais, Dieu! quels enfants nous sommes ensemble. I must often wonder if you are so happy with me as I am with you? I cannot say why it is, but if you only be there I am content. Tell me, is it at all so for you?"

"I enjoy you," she answered; "most men are stupid or horrid."

"When?" he asked anxiously.

"When one is much with them."

He looked at her with some alarm.

"But are many men much with you?"

Rosina laughed merrily over the trouble in his face.

"You would have been unbearable if you had been of a jealous disposition," she said, nodding.

"Yes," he replied gravely, "I have always feel that myself; for with me it is very strong that there shall be no other. But tell me now, truly are many men much with you?"

"Why I have hosts of friends," she declared, "and, on account of the way that the world is made, half of them are obliged to be men."

"But you said that they were all stupid or horrible," he reminded her carefully.

"I said that most of them were."

He thought a moment.

"I wish that there had been a bouillon here," he said then.

She began to put on her gloves, thinking that the hour of departure was close at hand.

"J'ai envie de fumer une cigarette," he said suddenly, "ca ne vous fait rien d'attender un peu?"

"I don't care," she answered, and laid her gloves down again.

"Am I ever horrible to you?" he asked, taking a match from the white china pyramid that ornamented the centre of the table.

"I didn't say 'horrible;' I said 'horrid.'"

"Is there a difference?" he lit his cigarette.

"Yes, indeed."

He crossed his arms upon the table, and smiled at her through his own personal quota of smoke.

"Tell me the difference. Why are we horrid?"

"Because you so often are. Men never understand."

"Au contraire," he said quietly, "men always understand. It is the woman who will not believe it, and it is cruel to say her the truth. A woman is always genee, she will sob in a man's arms and still declare that 'No.' Why is it necessary for her to be so? That I cannot understand."

Rosina caught a quick little breath; she had not been prepared for such a turn of conversation. Von Ibn went on with a degree of nonchalance that masked his close observance admirably.

"When a man loves a woman, he knows certainly if she loves him or not. It is there every minute in her eyes and on her lips; and yet he must ask her, and she must pretend a surprise. Why? We are altogether human. Then why must women be different? I am most sorry for a poor woman; she cannot be kissed or caressed or loved without the pretence that she dislikes it. It must be very difficult."

She felt her face getting warm.

"You do not like what I have say?" he asked.

"No."

"Because it is true?"

"It isn't true."

"An American would not say that to you?"

"Certainly not."

"Do you like better the American way of covering up all truth?"

"It is politer, I think."

He looked at her for a moment.

"I have been horrible, n'est-ce pas?" he asked.

She felt very uncomfortable indeed.

"Do let us go now," she said in a low tone.

He struck his water-glass with a knife, and their waitress, who was near by, looked around.

"'Zahlen!" he called to her. She nodded. He went for his coat and hat, and when he returned Rosina was fastening the frogs on her jacket.

"I would have put it on if you had waited," he said in a tone of remonstrance.

"I am used to getting into it," she assured him.

He looked attentively at her and perceived more than she thought. Then the waitress came up and recited all that they had eaten in a sing-song tone, and he pushed some money towards her with a gesture that disposed of the question as to making change.

"We will go out now," he said, turning towards the door, and the next minute they were in the cool, fresh night air. He put his hand upon her arm, and bent his head a little.

"Do not be vexed with me," he said softly; "even a little vexing of you makes me great pain."

Then he pressed her arm closely.

"It is not long that we have now to talk. I beg you talk to me; do not be so sad."

"I'm not sad."

"Then talk."

She gathered up her energy with a mighty effort.

"What shall we talk about?"

"Anything. Have you a letter to-day?"

"Yes."

"From who? From Jack?"

"No, from the Marquis de W——."

His fingers came together over her arm in a vice-like grip.

"I have never heard of him," he cried; "where have you know him?"

"In Paris. And then I met him on the train—"

Von Ibn's eyes grew large with fright.

"But you must not meet men on trains," he said; "that is not at all proper for you."

"He took charge of me from Paris to Lucerne," she said soothingly; "he is really very delightful—"

"I did not see him at Lucerne," he interrupted.

"No, he was gone when you came."

"How old is he?"

"He is seventy."

His heat subsided suddenly, and there was a pause during which she felt circulation returning slowly to her arm.

"And you have a letter from him to-day?" he asked, after a while.

"I have a letter from him almost every day."

He looked down at her with an air of genuine astonishment.

"What can a man of seventy say in a letter almost every day?" he asked.

"He can say a great deal. He wants me to marry him!"

He laughed aloud, and then exclaimed gayly:

"What a great lady you will be! and how nice you will look in your mourning!" and then he threw his cigarette away and laughed afresh.

His laughter was so infectious that she laughed also.

"He writes me how happy I would be with him," she continued merrily; "and he is very positive about it, too. How can he think that I would really wish to marry him?"

"He can think it very well from the newspapers of your land. Is he not a marquis? If I did not love you, I should always have surprise to think that you are an American, and will not let me make you a great lady."

She ignored this speech in its entirety.

"To think," she pursued, "that one cannot travel in a daughterly way with a gentleman of seventy without—"

"Yes," he interrupted, "but that is why it is best not to travel in the charge of gentlemen. One is always so liable to be disagreeably urged to become a marchioness."

She assented with a thoughtful nod.

"I don't answer all his letters," she said; "I burn them."

"Poor marquis!"

"They are good letters of their kind; but there are a whole lot of things which it does not pay to write to a widow. You can fool a girl, but a widow always knows."

"Does a widow always know?"

"Oh, dear me; yes."

"Then why did you not save the poor marquis his pain?"

"I never dreamed of his feeling that way. How could I? I only thought he was delightful. And always, even the first day at Madame de S——'s, when he said adieu he would kiss my hands in the most adorable Louis XIV. kind of a way."

"And all the while it was in his heart a plot to marry you. You see!"

"Men are so queer," she reflected; "I cannot see why that old gentleman should have wanted to marry me."

"I can," said Von Ibn, dryly; "I can see quite well."

The marquis as a topic of conversation seemed at an end. They were in the Hellerstrasse, going towards the river, and the heaviness which the Isar always cast over her fell down about her spirits.

"Oh, I cannot believe that in forty-eight hours I shall be gone!" she exclaimed suddenly.

"Do not go," he said, tightening his hold upon her arm again; "stay with me."

"I must go," she declared. "I couldn't stay with you, anyway," she added, in a tone of unintended mournfulness.

His mood altered, and the light of a street lamp showed that every tinge of gayety had fled his face.

"You have no will of your own," he said with acerbity; "that Jack has it all. I find you so very weak."

She raised her eyes to his and they looked strangely at one another. The moon was above them, full and beautiful, and the Isar rapids were murmuring their far cry.

"We shall return over the Ludwigsbrucke," he said, and they went down the incline in silence.

She thought vaguely, "I am here now, and he is here! How will it be when I am gone and we are separated forever?" But her brain refused to comprehend—only her heart felt the warmth of his touch upon her sleeve.

So they came down to the bridge, which abuts on an island and accommodates the tram passing from the Ostbahnhof to the Marien Platz. The Isarthor rose up grimly between the city lights and their view. Above was the golden moon. Behind, the black outlines of the suburb which they had just quitted.

"Let us stop here," he proposed, pausing by the bridge rail, and she stayed her steps in obedience.

It was nearly nine o'clock, and the passers-by were few. They had the bridge quite to themselves; the water running beneath murmured gently, but did not interrupt even their unvoiced thoughts.

The man took out his etui and lit another cigarette, sinking his sombre gaze meanwhile deep into the stream below. His companion leaned upon the stone parapet.

And then he sighed most heavily.

"It is the autumn," he said; "all the summer is over. Tout est fini!" There was a profound melancholy in his voice which threw a band of iron about her throat and choked all power of speech out of her. "How little I know last May of what this summer brings," he continued; "I have believe that all summers were to come alike to me."

A tram approached and crossed behind them with a mighty rumble. When all was still he spoke again, and the tone of his voice was childishly wistful.

"I did not know, there in Lucerne, before you came, how happy I might be. You are not so wonderful, but to me you are now a need, like air which I must breathe to live."

There was an anguish underlying his words which set her heart to aching intolerably.

"Oh," she gasped helplessly, "let us walk on! Let us go home! I cannot bear to hear all that again."

She turned to go, but he caught her hand in his.

"I must speak," he said forcefully, though in the lowest possible tones; "it is perhaps the tenth time, but it is certainly the last time. Will you not think once more again of it all, and say here now that you love me?"

He held her hand so tightly that it was impossible for her to withdraw it. She looked up in his face, and the moon showed each the unfeigned feeling of the other.

"You don't know about marriage," she told him with white lips and laboring breath. "One may be very unhappy alone, and there is always the strength to bear, but when you are married and unhappiness comes, there is always that other unhappiness chained to you like a clog, shutting out all joy in the present, all hope in the future; and nothing can help you, and you can help nothing." She stopped and put her hand to her bosom. "Only death can help!" she cried, in a voice as if a physical torture had its grip upon her; "and it is so awful when death alone can help!" She looked at the ground and then up at him. "Oh," she sighed miserably, "how can I dare to go where I may come to that pass again? Don't ask that of me."

He turned his face away from her and she felt his fingers loosen, little by little, their clasp upon her arm. Then he loosed her altogether, left her side, moved away a space, and stood, his head bowed, his eyes bent upon the water. There was a fearful horror of hopelessness in his attitude.

Down from the Gasteig came a cab, an empty cab, and he looked up and hailed it.

"We will ride home," he said, coming back to her; "I am bereft of strength."

The cab halted and he put her inside.

"6 Maximiliansstrasse," he called to the driver, and got in himself and banged the door behind him.

Then he threw himself back against the cushions, covered his eyes with his hand, and remained silent and motionless the ten minutes that they were en route.

She did not speak either; she dared not. The air was so heavy with sorrow and despair that words would have seemed like desecration; and the telepathic misery that emanated from him loaded her soul as if she had been guilty of a crime.

When the cab stopped he opened the door, and as he turned to give her his hand she caught one shocked glimpse of the grief in his face—of the oddly drawn look of suffering in his half-closed eyes. The whole change in him, in them, in it all, had come so quickly that as she stepped from the cab she was conscious of a stunned sensation, a dazed lack of feeling, a cold and stony power to bear much—for a little while.

"Go by the door," he said in muffled tones, "I must pay the cab."

She crossed the width of the sidewalk and stood by the great porte, waiting.

When the cabman was disposed of he came to her side, and felt in his pocket for the keys. Then he took his gloves off and felt again; as he felt he stared steadily across the street.

"It's the round key," she said, when he finally produced them. "Have you any tapers? I'm afraid that the hall will be dark."

He shrugged his shoulders as if tapers were of no earthly consequence in such a time of stress. Then he fitted the key in the lock and swung back the massive portal.

Because of that vast key system which is part of the intricacy of the very good housekeeping of Frau G——, there was no necessity to disturb the Hausmeister; but nothing could lessen the wail of the door which let them in with a groan, and closed behind them with a bang that was worthy of the occasion. It was the man's place to have lessened the noise by laying a restraining hand upon the lock, in accordance with the printed directions nailed against the main panel, but Rosina felt intuitively that this was no time to remind him of the fact.

With the closing of the door they were left in a darkness thorough and complete.

Rosina's voice: "You said you had wax tapers."

Von Ibn's voice: "No, I have not say so."

Rosina's accents of distress: "Haven't you any tapers?"

Von Ibn's voice, dully: "Yes, I have, but I have not say so before."

Rosina, entreatingly: "Then do please light one."

Dead silence.

She began to walk towards the stairs that she could not see; as she did so she heard his keys jingling, and knew from the sound that he must be hunting the wherewithal for illumination. He struck a match and adjusted it in the small hole at the end of the box, and as he did so he called:

"Stop! wait for me to come also."

She paused and looked back towards him. By the white light of the little taper his face appeared absolutely ghastly, and his heavy eyelids drooped in a way that pierced her heart.

"I think," he said, when he was beside her, "that it is better that I go to-morrow very early, and that we meet no more."

At that she was forced to put her hand against the wall in the seeking for some support without herself. They were upon the first step of the stairs, she leaning against one side wall and he standing close to the other. After he had spoken he crossed to her and his voice altered.

"If you had loved me," he said, "here—now—I should have kissed you, and all would have been for us as of the skies above."

"Oh, look out!" she exclaimed.

He was close above her.

"You are afraid of me?"

"No, it is the wax; you are letting it drip on us both."

"It should stop upon the box," he said shortly.

She began to mount the stairs, pulling off her gloves as she went. One fell, and he stooped quickly for it, with the result that he dropped the match-box. Again they were alone in the darkness.

"This is an awful place," he said irritably, feeling blindly for what was lost. "That I am on my knees to a match-box this night," he added savagely.

Her soul was full of sympathy for him. She bent to aid him in his search, and her hand in its wandering encountered his own. He seized her fingers and pressed them to his lips, and she knew that he was kneeling close at her feet.

"This is impossible," he said vaguely, hurriedly; "we may not part now in a minute, like this. You have spoken foolishly, and I have accept it too quick. We must speak longer and talk reasonably to each of us. We must go where we may sit down and be quiet. Faut etre raisonable. Let us go out of the door and go to the Cafe Luitpold and there speak."

The Cafe Luitpold is a gorgeous and fashionable resort in the Briennerstrasse; its decorations are a cross between Herrn-Chiemsee and a Norddeutscher steamer, and its reputation is blameless.

"I can't go to the Cafe Luitpold at ten o'clock at night in a golf skirt," she objected gently, and tried to continue on her upward way; but he held her fast by her hand, and as he pressed it alternately to his face and lips, she felt her flesh wet with hot tears.

"You are crying!" she exclaimed in awe.

"I hope not," he said; "I hope not, but I am near it. If I do weep, will you then despise me?"

"No," she said faintly; "no—I—"

He rose to his feet, and in the dark she knew him to be very, very near. He still held her hand and his breath touched her cheek.

"Oh," he whispered, "say you love me if it be but so little! Dites que vous m'aimez! I have hoped so greatly, I have dreamed so greatly; I will ask now no more to possess you for my own; I will content myself with what you can so easy give—only a little love—"

He drew his arm about her. Something within her was rising as the slow tide rises before the September gale, and she felt that all her firmness would be as the sand forts which the children build, when that irresistible final wave shall carry its engulfing volume over all. She summoned to her aid the most frightful souvenirs of her unhappy marriage, and pushed him violently away. His answer was a sudden grasp of mighty vigor, at which she gave a muffled scream.

"You detest me, then?" he said through his teeth.

"It is my hat," she cried, freeing herself; "you drove the longest pin straight into my head."

He moved a little away, and in so doing trod upon the match-box. Then in an instant there was light again, and he could see her, her arms upraised, straightening her hat.

"It is most badly on," he told her.

"I know it," she replied, starting swiftly upward.

At the curve he stopped short and shut his eyes; she stopped too, three steps farther on.

"Are you ill?" she asked anxiously.

He opened his eyes.

"I am most unhappy," he replied, and went on again.

So they came to the top at last.

"Here we are," she said, halting before the door; "give me the keys, they work intricately."

He handed them to her in silence; she took them in her hand and tried to smile.

"If you really go to-morrow," she said, as she put one into the lock, "I hope—" her lips trembled traitorously and she could not go on.

"Dites," he whispered, coming nearer, "you do care a little, a very—"

He dropped the matches a second time.

"That was never an accident," she cried, below her breath.

"It was not my intention," he declared; then he added, "you have only to go in, I can very well find my way out in the dark."

But the door refused to open; instead, the key turned around and around in the lock.

"I do believe," she said at last, in a curiously inexplicable tone, "that we have come up the wrong stairs!"

A sort of atmosphere of blankness saturated the gloom.

"Is there another stair?" he asked.

"Yes; it goes from the other passage. It's the staircase to No. 5. I think—indeed I'm sure—that we have come up the stairs of No. 6 with the keys of No. 5."

"I have never know that there was another stair," he declared. "If you had say that before I—" then a fresh thought led him to interrupt himself. "It is a fate that leads us. We must go to the street again, and we shall go to the American Bar and talk there."

The "American Bar" is the name which the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten has elected to give to a small and curious restaurant situated in its basement. There is nothing against the "American Bar" except its name, which naturally leads American women to avoid it.

"I don't want to go anywhere," said Rosina, drawing the keys into her hand; "it is no use. We are both all used up. I want to get home. And I couldn't go anywhere if I wanted to in this skirt."

"It is always that skirt," he cried angrily; "that my heart breaks to-night is nothing,—only ever I must hear of your skirt."

"Oh, where are the matches?" she said nervously; "we must find them somehow."

He stooped to institute another search, and the umbrella slipped from his hand; it struck the floor with a noise that echoed from the attic to the cellar.

"Oh!" she gasped sharply; "we shall wake every one in the building before we get through."

"It is very terrible—this night," he said quietly, and as he spoke he found the match-box and there was light again. Then he picked up his umbrella, and they returned down the three flights of stairs. In the lower hall he stopped again.

"We cannot separate like this," he said, laying his hand upon her arm; "there are doings that one human cannot do. I must speak longer with you before I go. It is not talking to be going ever up and down steps with a wax taper. I know nothing of what I have say since we leave the cab, and here, each minute, any one may enter. When we go out, come with me across to the Hofbrauhaus, and there we will talk for but five minutes, and then you shall return. Your skirt will go very well there. We shall quickly return. Dites 'oui'."

The Hofbrauhaus is, as its name indicates, the cafe, or rather brasserie, of the Court brewery. It is a curious place, the beer of which is backed by centuries of fame, and Von Ibn told no lie when he said that any skirt would do well there.

"Oh, I can't go," she said, almost crying in her distress and agitation. "It will do no good; we just suffer more and more the longer we are together. I am miserable and you are miserable, and it takes all my strength to remember that if I yield we shall be very much more miserable in the end. Let me get home!"

She unlocked the large porte as she spoke, and he blew out the taper, pushed it open, held it while she passed through, and then stayed its slam carefully behind her.

Then there was the porte of No. 5 to unlock and the taper to relight, and three more staircases to mount.

"I shall go to-morrow morning," he said quietly and hopelessly, as they went a second time upon their upward way. "I shall put all the force of my will to it that I go. It is better so. Pourquoi vous vexer avec mon ardent desir pour vous?"

Her heart contracted with a spasm of pain, but she made no reply.

"To meet again will be but more to suffer," he continued. "I touch at the end of what I am capable to suffer. Why should I distress you for no good to any one? And for me all this is so very bad! I can accomplish nothing. The power dies in me these days. Toute ma jeunesse est prise! I feel myself become old and most desolate. I am content that it is good-bye here."

It seemed to her that her turn had come to falter, and fail to move, and close her eyes in misery. If—if—only—

But they went on slowly until the top landing was just above their heads. Both knew that the top landing must bring the termination of all.

She took the door-key in her hand, went a little ahead of him and fitted it noiselessly into the lock. It turned. The end was at hand. She looked towards him and attempted a smile. He put the match-box on the window ledge and drew her within his arms.

"It is for the first and the last time," he said hoarsely, and then he kissed her furiously, passionately,—twice, thrice, and once again. "C'est comme ca, l'amour!" he whispered; "and because you know nothing of it, you let it go from you."

Then he put his hand to his throat as if strangling, and, opening the door, stepped aside.

"Good-bye," he murmured, as she passed within. "Bon voyage!"

The door closed between them.

* * * * *

She went to her room and found Ottillie asleep upon the sofa.

She crossed to the window, opened it softly and leaned out; after a little she heard the door beneath open and close, and then his shadow fell beneath the electric light.

Then he was gone!

This time there would be no return.

The moisture of his lips was yet upon her own, and he was gone forever.

* * * * *

She crossed the room and fell upon her knees beside the bed.



PART III

THE BREAKING OF THE BARRIERS

Chapter Fourteen

It was very early, very dark, very cheerless, that most miserable hour of six o'clock in the morning, the very worst hour ever known in which to be routed out of bed in order that an unpleasant journey may be begun.

Without, it was faintly light; within, it was brightly gas. What is less cheerful than the aspect given a room by the gas burning high at six o'clock in the morning? Rosina's room looked absolutely ghastly, for it was bare of everything but travelling apparatus, and they were all strapped and waiting. She herself sat before her untouched breakfast tray and watched Ottillie lace her boots, while she dismally went over for the two hundred and seventy-sixth time every detail of the night before the last.

There was a tap at the door and Jack came in. He was tanned with his recent trip and had a thrilling new travelling ulster with carved deer-horn buttons. He had bought the buttons at the Tagernsee and had had an ulster constructed in Vienna, just as a background for them. He looked at his cousin with a buoyant air that she felt to be bitterly unkind, all things considered, and exclaimed:

"You must hurry up, my dear; the cab will be at the door in five minutes, and we don't want to miss that train, you know."

"I'm quite ready," she said helplessly.

"Is all this stuff going?" he asked, looking about; "you can't mean to carry all this with us to Genoa, surely."

Rosina's eyes strayed here and there over the umbrella case, the two dress-boxes, the carry-all, the toilet case, the two valises, the dress-suit case, and the hat-box. She did not appear to consider the total anything to be ashamed of.

"What's in those two boxes?" Jack continued.

"Clothes."

"Why didn't you put them in a trunk?"

"You told me to send all my trunks frachtgut two weeks ago. I had to keep out some to wear, naturally."

He drew a martyr's breath.

"You do beat all! I don't know how we're ever going to get all this stuff along with us. There isn't anything more, is there, Ottillie?"

"Oh, mais non, monsieur!"

"All right. You better have them take all this down; the cab must be there by this time."

Rosina stood up.

"I must say good-bye to Fraulein Helene and her mamma," she said sadly, going to the door.

The good-bye was a trying one, and its tears were harshly interrupted by a voice in the hall:

"Come on, Rosina, we're going to miss that train for a fact if you don't hurry."

"Go, my dear child," said Frau G——; "do not weep so. Many think that they are going forever, but they all always return."

Rosina choked, and went.

Jack rattled her down the stairs—those sob-provoking stairs—at a tremendous rate, and when they went out of the porte their eyes were greeted by a cab that looked like a furniture van, so overloaded was its capacity.

"George, but it's full!" Jack cried in dismay. "Well, there's no time to get another; we must just pile in some way and let it go at that."

They piled in some way and it went at that.

"The train leaves at 7.20," Jack remarked as they passed the post-office clock, "we shall just make it easy."

Rosina made no answer, and no one spoke again until they reached the Karl Platz and the cabman slowed up and looked around inquiringly; for some trains are reached from the front and some from the sides of the main station at Munich, and the cabs suit their routes to the circumstances from the Karl Platz on.

"Zurich!" Jack called out, "and hurry!" he added. "We really are making pretty close connection," he went on, "it's 7.05 now. But then there is only one trunk to check."

"I'm glad that that's yours," Rosina said, thinking of her hand luggage and his comments thereon.

He whistled blithely.

"Oh, we'll get there all straight," he said hopefully.

They drew up before the Bahnhof at 7.10, and it behooved the man of the party to be very spry indeed. He got their unlimited baggage on to a hand-truck, paid the cabman, and hustled the whole caravan inside.

"Wo fahren Sie hin?" asked the porter who operated the hand-truck, as he went leisurely after their haste.

"Zurich," said Jack, "and wir haben sehr wenig time to spare; you want to look lively." Then he rushed to the ticket gate to send Rosina and her maid aboard while the trunk was being weighed.

"Wo fahren Sie hin?" asked the man at the gate.

"Zurich."

"Train goes at 7.45."

"It doesn't either," said Jack, who understood German fluently, "it goes at 7.20."

For answer the man pointed to the great sign above his head, which bore out the truth of his statement in letters six inches high.

"Well, I vow," said Jack blankly, "if that man at Schenker's isn't the worst fraud I ever ran up against. Say, cousin, we've got over half an hour to check my trunk in."

She shook her head as if she didn't care.

"I'll go and see to it now," he said, "and then I'll come back here and try to get on to the train."

He went off, and they waited by the gate while the man stationed there looked at Ottillie, and her mistress recalled the tone in which a voice had said, "It is for the first and last time!" and what came next.

When Jack returned they were permitted to pass the gates and go aboard the cars. The porter loaded the entire length of both racks with their belongings, and as soon as he was paid Jack hung up his ulster with the deer-horn buttons, stretched himself at full length upon the longest seat, and was asleep within five minutes.

Rosina took the window corner opposite him and contemplated his callous slumber with a burning bitterness.

"And he must see how unhappy I am, too," she said to herself.

Then she leaned her chin upon her hand and fell into a reverie which so blinded her with tears that when the train did move out of the yards she beheld a Munich of mist and fog, and a Pasing which was a mere blot amidst the general blur of her universe. She did not want to go to Genoa, she wanted to stay in Germany; and everything which the train passed appeared to be returning towards Munich with all possible speed, while she, she alone, was being borne swiftly away from all—all—all.

"Leaving for home," she reflected. "I'm not leaving at all; I'm simply being wrenched away! Talk about turning one's face towards America! I'm not turning my face; I'm having my neck wrung in that direction!" and the tears rolled heavily down her cheeks.

Ottillie unfastened one of the small valises and handed her mistress a fresh pocket-handkerchief, an attention which was most welcome just at that juncture.

About ten o'clock Jack opened his eyes and yawned vigorously twice or thrice. Then he got up on his elbow.

"You are a pretty sight!" he said, after a lengthy contemplation of her woe; "you look like—like—well, you look pretty bad, and you haven't a soul to blame for it all but yourself."

She made no reply.

"There's Von Ibn gone north, declaring that his future is completely ruined, and you sit crying like a baby because you must leave him, and yet you won't marry him. If he was some worthless scoundrel that couldn't be thought of, you know very well that all we might try to say or do wouldn't keep you from him for three minutes; but just because he is so eminently all right you see a necessity for cooking up a sort of tragedy out of nothing, and making him crazy, and yourself about as bad."

"Have you heard from him?" she asked coldly.

"I know that he left Munich yesterday early. He must have been awfully cut up to have been willing to undertake a trip at that hour. He hates to get up early—"

"That's no crime."

"Who said it was? So far from being a crime, it ought to have been another bond of congeniality between you two."

"Do you know where he went?"

"If he was a man at home he'd take to drink and go to the devil, but being a fellow over here I suppose that he'll just go up the Zug-spitz and down the Matterhorn, and up Mont Blanc and down the Dent du Midi, until he considers himself whole again."

She choked and said no more.

The train guard came through soon after and put the usual question:

"Wo fahren Sie hin?"

"Zurich," said Jack, as he produced their tickets; "about what time do we get there?"

"Are you going straight through?" the guard inquired as he punched a page in each little book and restored the library to their rightful possessor.

"Yes."

"Then why did you not take the express?"

Jack fairly bounded in his seat.

"The express!" he ejaculated. "Great Scott, do you mean to say that we are not on it!!!"

"Oh, no," said the guard, "you are upon the way-train that follows half an hour later. The express arrives at two-forty; this train gets in between seven and eight at night."

Nothing could bear deeper testimony to the state of Rosina's crushed sensibilities than the way in which she received this bit of information. While Jack swore violently she continued to look out of the window with an indifference that was entirely genuine.

"To think that that other train must have been right there within a hundred feet of us!" cried her cousin.

She did not turn an eyelash.

"By George, Rosina, I don't believe I ever was as mad as this in all my life before!"

She sighed.

"I don't mind anything," she said sadly.

"You ought to mind getting to Zurich at eight o'clock instead of half-past two; there's quite a little difference."

"I don't mind," she repeated.

"Well, I do," said Jack. After a pause of stormy thought he unclenched his fist and said, "I bet I get even for this some day, but just at present I think that I'll go to sleep again."

Which he did forthwith.

About noon they came to Lindau on the Bodensee. Rosina shivered and felt sick, because Constance lay upon the further side. The train did not run beyond Lindau and a change was necessary. The change revealed the fact that there was a custom-house at that point. An unexpected custom-house is one of the worst features of continental travel; but the officials of Lindau were delightful, drew chalk circles on everything, and sent every one upon their way rejoicing. Our party went around the little station and were halted by a guard with the common greeting:

"Wo fahren Sie hin?"

"Zurich," Jack answered, hauling out his tickets.

"Fahren Sie mit Bahn oder fahren Sie mit Schiff?"

Jack looked nonplussed.

"Which are the tickets for?" he asked.

"Either."

He turned to where Rosina waited, her eyes gazing in the direction of Constance.

"Oh, Rosina," he called out, "do you want to fahr from here on mit the Bahn or the Schiff?"

"I don't care," she replied.

"What's the difference, anyhow?" he asked the man.

"With the boat you do not connect with the train on the other shore," he was told.

"You don't, eh? Well, I'm very anxious to make that train upon the other shore, so I think we'll fahr right along mit the Bahn. Come on!" he called again to his cousin, "we must get aboard."

They went slowly along the platform to the train gate.

"They call Lindau the German Venice," he said, as they waited to pass the gate, "but I don't think that it looks very Venetian; do you?"

She choked, because Venice began with V, and felt herself quite unable to frame an answer to his question.

As every one but themselves seemed to have elected for the "Schiff," they found an entire wagon empty and spread their luggage out well. Jack even went so far as to establish himself in solitary state in an adjoining compartment, to the end that he might consider the proposition of more sleep. Before the train was well under way the guard came through, and past experience led Rosina to call through the connecting door:

"Do ask him if we must change again."

"Do we change again?" he asked.

"Wo fahren Sie hin?"

"Zurich."

"You must change in Bregenz."

"We must change in Bregenz," Jack called out.

By that time the German Venice was well behind, and the train was skirting the southern shore of the Bodensee. The sun was shining on the waves, and the woods upon the banks were spattered with red and yellow. And off to the north Constance was lying. Ah, Constance—the Stadtgarten—Huss' Tower—the "Souvenir" of Vieuxtemps!

Rosina wept afresh.

"Oh, Ottillie," she sobbed, forlornly, "que je suis malheureuse aujourd'hui!"

Ottillie opened her little bag and handed her mistress another fresh handkerchief; it was the only way in which she could testify to her devotion upon this especial day.

At Bregenz they descended, with the aid of a porter, at about half-past two. As they left the train it was borne in upon them that this change was not a change at all, but just another custom-house.

"What strange country have we run up against, I'd like to know!" Jack asked in amazement; and then the black cocks' plumes in the casquette of the douanier revealed the information that he craved.

"How does Austria get to the Bodensee?" Rosina begged to know, having seen the cocks' plumes as quickly as he had.

"I don't know," replied Jack, not at all pleased at the discovery as to where they were. "It does seem as if every country in Europe has a finger in this lake, though; or, if they haven't, they keep a custom-house open on it just as a side line to their regular business."

The porter led them into the great wooden shed, where some unplaned boards laid across boxes served as counters, Bregenz being in the throes of the erection of a new station.

"I bet they make it plain whether its kronen or gulden," said Rosina's cousin as he threw his valise on top of the porter's small mountain; "if I'd known that I was to come in connection with that vile money system again I'd have schiffed it across the lake or walked around the northern shore before I'd ever have come this route."

By this remark he testified to a keen recollection of his Viennese experiences and the double dealing (no pun intended) of the Austrian shopkeeper just at the present epoch in the national finance system of that country.

Behind the boards two uniformed officials paced up and down, and when all was neatly ranged before them the one bestowed his attention upon Rosina while the other turned his in among the infinity of boxes belonging to her party. He peeped into two or three of the valises and chalked them and all of their kind; then he demanded the opening of the largest dress-box. Ottillie unstrapped it and undertook to satisfy his curiosity to the fullest possible extent.

The object uppermost of all was a Russian leather writing-tablet. The official leapt upon that at once.

"On this you must pay thirty centimes," he declared, grabbing it up.

"Warum?" said Jack. He found "warum" the most useful word in his German vocabulary, because by the very nature of things it always threw the burden of the conversation on to the shoulders of the other party.

"You cannot pretend that it is an article of wearing apparel for madame," said the officer archly.

"I never said that it was an article of wearing apparel for any one," Jack retorted hotly; "I asked why I had to pay thirty centimes on it. It isn't new and it isn't dutiable, and I know that, and you know it too."

"What is it, anyhow?" asked the man.

"It's to write on."

"Why does not madame write on paper, like everybody else?" inquired the witty fellow.

"There's your six cents," said Jack, in great disgust; "I reckon you take pfennigs, don't you?"

"Oh, yes," said the Austrian, "we take everything."

"Yes," replied the American, "so I observed in Vienna."

Then he turned away and the porter loaded up again.

They went out on the platform and were told that the train had just gone.

"Wo fahren Sie hin?" asked the guard, taking pity on their consternation at being left high and dry so unexpectedly.

"Zurich."

"Oh, then that wasn't your train anyway; that train went to Rorshack. You take the Zurichbahn at half-past three."

There was three-quarters of an hour to wait.

"Do you suppose that there is anything worth seeing in Bregenz?" the man of the party suggested.

"I don't want to see it if there is," his cousin replied.

"Well, I do want to see it, even if there isn't," he answered; "you and Ottillie can go into the waiting-room and I'll be back in half an hour."

So he went off whistling, his ulster floating serenely around him. Rosina established herself in a boarded-off angle which under existing circumstances was dignified by the title of "Warte-Saal," and every nail that was driven into the new Gare of Bregenz pierced her aching heart and echoed in her aching head.

After the lapse of half an hour Jack turned up again, having thoroughly exhausted Bregenz and purchased a new cane most ingeniously carved with bears' heads and paws interlaced.

He was not overpleased to be informed that the Zurichbahn was late, and that there was no probability of their leaving the dominions of Francis Joseph before four o'clock at the earliest.

"It's an awful shame the way this world is put on," he said, yawning and walking up and down; "it would be Paradise to Von Ibn to have the right to cart you and your bags around, and it's h—l for me, and I've got it to do notwithstanding."

"I never sent for you to take me home," Rosina said in an outraged tone.

"Oh, I wasn't blaming you," he declared amicably.

"Oh," she said coldly, "I thought that you were."

The Zurichbahn was very late, and did not put in an appearance until half-past four. Then they went aboard with a tired feeling that would have done credit to an arrival in Seattle from New York.

"Do we change again?" Rosina asked with latent sarcasm, when the guard (a handsome guard, worthy to have been a first lieutenant at the very least) came through to tear some pages out of their little books.

"Wo fahren Sie hin?" he asked, with a beaming smile.

"Zurich," Jack sung out, with renewed vigor.

The guard opened the door leading into the next compartment, and then, when his exit was assured, he told them:

"Must in St. Margarethen change," and vanished.

"He knows the time for disappearing, evidently," Jack said; "I bet somebody that felt as I do threw him out of the window when he said that once. And I have a first-class notion of getting down and taking the next train straight back to Munich for the express purpose of murdering that fellow that started us out this morning."

Rosina felt a deep satisfaction that none of his heat could be charged up to her; she had offered no advice as to this unlucky day. She sat there silent, her eyes turned upon the last view of the Bodensee, and after some varied and picturesque swearing her cousin laid down and went to sleep again.

They arrived in St. Margarethen about half-past five, and night, a damp, chill night, was falling fast. The instant that the train halted a guard rushed in upon them.

"Wo fahren Sie hin?" he cried, breathlessly.

"Zurich, d—— you!" Jack howled. He was making too small a shawl-strap meet around too large a rug for the fifth time that day, and the last remnant of his patience had fled.

"Must be very quick; no time to lose," said the man and hurried away.

That he spoke a deep and underlying truth was evidenced by the mad rush of passengers and porters which immediately ensued. They joined the crowd and found themselves speedily flung in some shape into Zurichbahn No. II., which moved out of the station at once.

Jack was too saturated with sleep to be able to try any more. He went through to the smoker's compartment, and Rosina looked apathetically out upon the Lake of Zurich and reflected her same reflections over again and again. The moon, which had looked down upon the Isar rapids, rode amidst masses of storm clouds above the dark sheet of water, and illuminated with its fitful light the shadows that lay upon the bosom of the waves. She felt how infinitely darker were the shadows within her own bosom, and how vain it was to seek for any moon among her personal clouds.

"It's a terrible thing to have been married," she thought bitterly. "Before you've been married you're so ready to be married to any one, and after you've been married you don't dare marry any one." Then she took out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes. "Oh, dear," she sobbed, "it doesn't seem as if I could possibly be more wretched with him than I am without him!"

They reached Zurich in the neighborhood of nine o'clock. The end of a trip always brings a certain sense of relief to the head of the party, and Jack's spirits rose prodigiously as he got them all into a cab.

"We'll get something to eat that's good," he declared gayly, "and then to-morrow, after a first-class night's sleep, we'll go over the Gotthard, and be in Milan Monday. And then, ho for Genoa, Gibraltar, and joy everlasting!"

He seized Rosina's hand and gave it a hard squeeze.

"Cheer up, you poor dear!" he cried; "you'll come out all right in the end,—now you see!"

She pressed her lips tightly together and did not trust herself to say one word in reply.

She felt that she was beginning to really hate her cousin.



Chapter Fifteen

They stood at the summit of that double flight of marble steps which run up the right-hand side of the Milan Cathedral's roof and down the left. There are one hundred steps on either side, and having just mounted the right-hand hundred Rosina looked down the left-hand hundred with an affright born of appreciative understanding.

"Oh, Jack," she cried, "I never shall get down from here alive! What did you ever bring me up for?"

"I brought you up to talk," said her cousin. "Come over here, and sit down on the ridge-pole beside me."

The ridge-pole of the Milan Cathedral is of white marble, like all the rest of the edifice; it is wide and flat, and just the height for a comfortable seat.

The cousins placed themselves side by side thereon, and Jack lit a cigarette while he deliberated on just how he should proceed with the case in hand.



"Well," he said at last, folding his arms, clearing his throat, crossing his legs, and in other ways testifying to the solemnity of what was forthcoming, "I want you to pay a lot of attention to what I'm going to say, Rosina, for I'm going to talk to you very seriously, and you must weigh my words well, for once let us get out to sea next week and it will be too late to ever take any back tacks as to this matter."

She turned her sad eyes towards him; she was looking pale and tired, but not cross or impatient.

"Go on," she said quietly.

"It's just this: it's four days now since we left Munich, and I can see that your spirits aren't picking up any; instead, you seem more utterly done up every day. So I've made up my mind to give you one more chance. It's this way: you know we're all awfully fond of you and proud of you and all that, but you know too that no one can ever make you out or manage you—unless it's me," he added parenthetically; "and you always do what you please, and you always will do what you please, and the family share in the game generally consists in having to get you out of the messes that your own folly gets you into. You didn't need to marry, you know, but you just would do it in spite of anything that any one could say, and all we could do was to be sorry for it, and sorry for you when you were unhappy, as we all knew that you would be beforehand. And that was the one mess that no one could get you out of. Well, then he died, and you had another show." Jack paused and jarred his cigarette ash off with his finger-tip. "You know and I know just who there was waiting there at home, but you elected to turn them all down and come over here to travel around alone. And that was all right as long as you stayed alone, but terribly risky when,—well, when that letter was written in Zurich—"

"Ah," she cried sharply, "then it was from Zurich!"

"Yes, it was from Zurich," he replied indifferently; "and it was perfectly natural under the circumstances that the letter should have been written. The letter was straightforward enough, only, of course, it necessitated Uncle John's sending me over to—"

"But I hadn't known him but three days then," she interrupted.

"That wasn't making any difference to him, evidently. And so I came over and looked up everything; and I even did more, I came there to Munich and went off with him on that trip so as to learn just everything that it was possible to learn, and it all comes to just what I've told you before: if you want to marry him, you can; if you don't want to marry him, you needn't; but for Heaven's sake why do you persist in refusing him if it uses you up so awfully?"

Her mouth quivered and her eyes filled slowly.

"Have you been flirting?" he asked, with a very real kindness veiled in his voice, "or do you really love him?"

She lifted her wet eyes to his.

"I don't know," she said, with simple sincerity; and after a minute she added, "But I can't make up my mind to marry just for the sake of finding out."

Jack whistled softly.

"So that's it!" he said at last.

They remained sitting quietly side by side for two or three minutes, and then he spoke again; his voice was gentle, but firm and resolved, and there was a sort of finality about his words which clinched into her heart like an ice-grip.

"Then the best thing to do is just what we're doing; I know that you wanted to stay and see more of him, but, feeling as you do, that wouldn't have been right to him or to yourself either. It seems tough on you, but you'll get over it in a few months, and if it comes to a funeral for Von Ibn—why, it isn't our funeral, anyway!"

He stood up as he spoke, and smiled and held out his hand to her. She rose, feeling as if some fearful ultimatum had been proclaimed above her head.

"It's sort of hard, you know," Jack said, as he assisted her carefully down the steep steps; "it's awful hard to travel with you and have you never smile and never say anything, and not be able to explain that you feel bad because you won't marry a man who wants you and whom you want."

"I married just such a man once upon a time," she replied sadly.

"Yes," said Jack; "but I didn't like that man, and I do like Von Ibn."

She drew a quick breath.

From the cathedral they returned directly to the hotel.



Chapter Sixteen

It was Genoa.

The end of all was at hand.

Rosina recollected the careless, callous manner with which in earlier, happier days she had spoken of this fated spot.

"Are you going home by the Southern Route?"

"Yes, we sail from Genoa;" or, "Do you leave at Naples?" "Oh, no, it's Monte Carlo this time, so we shall get off at Genoa."

Genoa!

Once she had thought its blue mountain masses most sublimely beautiful, now anything with hollows and shadows reminded her of those two misery-circled eyes, and she was led to wonder afresh if he, or she, would ever recover.

It is always astonishing how the port from which we sail partakes of our sailing sentiments. It's a "jolly good place" or a "dull old hole," just according to who is on the deck or who is on the dock. Handkerchiefs flutter gayly in the stolid face of Hoboken every day of the year, and many beside Marie Stuart have wept themselves out of sight of sunny France. It isn't the place that counts when the anchor goes down or up, it's the Who and the When; and in view of what has filled all the foregoing pages I trust that the reader will sympathize with Rosina and pardon my slang if I state that Genoa appeared to her upon this occasion very much more rocky than ever before.

Their arrival had not been auspicious, to begin with. The cab on its narrow way hotel-ward had collided energetically with another cab and had a wheel taken off. Jack was on the high side, and Rosina was only too anxious to have anything happen to her; but Ottillie, who had narrowly escaped being pitched out on her head, was quite perturbed, and feared that the accident was a bad omen for the voyage.

The following morning Rosina saw her cousin leave for the inevitable visit to Fratelli's, and when he was safely out of the way she put on a walking-suit, veiled herself thickly, and, taking a carriage, went all alone to that grand eastern sweep of boulevard whose panorama of sea and city is so beyond the language of any pen to portray. At the summit she dismissed the carriage, and rested there alone, leaning against the iron balustrade, her eyes turned afar, her bosom riven by emotions as limitless as the horizon that lay before her. A sailing-vessel was spreading its wings for an Egyptian flight; in the port to her right the great white ocean liner was loading her cargo; overhead the gulls whirled, shrieking. But to all she was blind, deaf, unwitting.

For with the conversation upon the ridge-pole of the Milan Cathedral life had seemed to close for her. The finality of Jack's ruling had barred the future out of her present forever. There is no more unmitigated grief for a woman than to be chained to the consequences begotten of her own way, and to have her judgment taken seriously and acted upon, to the end that all possible chance of change is swept forever beyond the reach of her will.

She hung there against the cold iron and knew no tears, because her wretchedness had outstripped their solace.

Her reasons had reached the pass where they craved to be overruled, and no one was going to overrule them. She did not state the facts to herself in so many words, but she felt her helplessness and moaned her pain.

Oh, that pain! the pain of one who sees the light too late, who divines the sun only by the splendor of the glow which it has left behind. What memories they hold to torture everlastingly! What reveries they nurse from thence on evermore!

If only more had been said, or less! If only more had been denied, or granted! There is forever imprinted on the brain some one especial look which time can never dim—some special word whose burden nor sleep nor wake will lighten.

There, at her feet, the Isar rushed, and through the myriad murmur of its rapids his voice came back to her. "Tout est fini,—all is finished!" he had said, with that enveloping mist of melancholy in which his spirit shrouded itself so easily. And then a wax taper flashed before the blackness that sheathed her vision, and she looked in heart-quivering agony upon the dumb appeal of those great, brown eyes, with their shadows doubled by the torturing of the hour.

"He felt perhaps as I feel now," she thought, pressing her hand against her bosom; "I didn't know then—I didn't know!"

She turned to walk along the cliff.

"If I was sure," she told herself, "I think that I would—" but there she paused, shuddered violently, and left the phrase unfinished.

At luncheon Jack was uncommonly cheerful. He asked her if she didn't want to go to Nice and spend one of the two days before their departure. She shook her head.

"But why don't you go?" she said; "you could just as well as not."

"I don't know but that I will," he replied; "only I hate to leave you here alone."

"Oh, I'll do very well," she assured him, smiling.

About four that afternoon he came into her room, where she was lying in a reclining-chair by the window, looking listlessly out and dreaming of Munich. He stood before her for a long time, contemplating her and the gown of lace and silk which foamed about her throat and arms, and then cascaded down to spread in billows on the floor.

"I declare," he said suddenly, "it seems wasteful somehow for you to dress like that just to sit here alone."

Her mouth curved a little.

"Is that a night-dress?" he inquired curiously.

"No, cousin, it's a tea-gown."

"Oh!"

He stood still beside her.

"They told me a funny thing at the steamship office this morning," he said, after a while; "the man says that there's never a steamer sails but that some one who has made their last payment down is obliged for some reason to stay behind."

"Do they give them back their money?" she asked, trying to appear interested.

"Yes; and they always fill the room either at Naples or Gibraltar."

And still he stood there.

"Why don't you sit down?" she asked at last.

"Where's Ottillie?" he said, without seeming to notice her question.

"I've sent her out to do some errands. Why, do you want anything done?"

"No;" he leaned over and kissed her cheek. "I do love you, Rosina," he added, half joking, half serious; "I wonder what sort of a show I'd have had if I'd tried—ever?"

She shrank from him with a quick breath.

"Oh, Jack, I beg of you, don't tease me these days."

He straightened up and laughed, taking out his watch.

"It's quarter after four," he said, reflecting. "The mail must be in; I'll see if there are any letters," and he went out.

She remained by the window, twirling the shade-tassel with her idle fingers, and seeing, not the rattle and clatter of Italian street-life, but the great space of the Maximilian-Joseph Platz, with the doves pattering placidly over the white and black pattern of its pavement, and the Maximiliansstrasse stretching before her with the open arches of the Maximilianeum closing its long vista at the further end....

Quick steps in the hall broke in upon her day dream, and her cousin re-entered, an open letter in his hand and his face curiously drawn. He gave her one strange look and halted.

"What has happened?" she asked hastily and anxiously.

He went to the window and looked out, so that his back was turned towards her and his face concealed from her view.

"I've just heard from Von Ibn," he said briefly.

"Is that letter from him?"

"No; he's not writing any letters these days."

"Oh—" she began, and then stopped.

He kept his back towards her, and then, after a short pause:

"He's going all to pieces," he said in a low tone, very slowly.

"Oh—" she exclaimed again, and again stopped.

"I reckon he's pretty badly off; he's got beyond himself. He's—well, he's—. Rosina, the long and short of it is, he's gone crazy!"

She rose slowly out of her seat, her face deadly white, her finger-nails turned cruelly into her palms.

"Jack!" she stammered; "Jack!"

He continued to look from the window.

"I knew he'd take it awfully hard," he said, in a voice that sounded strained, "but I didn't think he'd give up so completely; he's—"

Then she screamed, reaching forth and touching his hand.

"You're not breaking it to me that he's dead! You're not telling me that he's dead!"

He turned from the window at that, and was shocked at her face and the way that her hands were twisting.

"I know he's dead!" she screamed again, and he sprang forward and caught her in his arms as she sank down there at his knees.

"He is not dead!" he told her forcefully; "honestly, he is not dead! But he's in a bad way, and with it all just as it is, I don't know what to do about you. If you don't care, why, as I said before, it's not our funeral; but if you do care, I—well, I—"

"Oh, Jack, can I go to him? I must go to him! Can't you take me to him?"

She writhed in his arms as if she also was become a maniac.

"Do you really want to go to him? Do you know what that means? It means no more backing out, now or never."

"I know, I understand, I'm willing! Only hurry! only telegraph that I will come! only—" she began to choke.

"I'll tell you," said he, putting her into the big chair again; "you shall go to him. Stay there a minute and I'll get my railway guides and look it up right away. Collect yourself, be a good girl!"

He went out, and she folded her hands and prayed wildly:

"God, let him live! God, take me to him!" over and over again.

And then her impatience stretched the seconds into minutes, and she sought her cousin's room, which was just across the hall from the suite given to herself.

She flung the door open without knocking and entered precipitately, expecting to find Jack and the railway guides. But Jack was not there.

There was a man there, sitting by the window, twisting his moustache and biting his lips in raging impatience. To this man Jack had said three minutes before, "She'll be in here in less than sixty seconds. I'm going to the steamship office," and then the man had been left to wait, and his was not a patient disposition....

A tall man, a dark man, a man whose hair lay in loose, damp, wavy locks above his high forehead; a man whose eyes were heavy-circled underneath, and whose long, white hands beat nervously upon the chair-arms.

At the sound of the opening door the man looked up. She was there, staring as if petrified, by the door.

He made one bound. She was within his arms.

"Alors tu m'aimes!" he cried, and something mutual swallowed her reply and the consciousness of both for one long heaven-rifting minute.

"Alors tu m'aimes?" he said again, with a great quivering breath; "tu m'aimes, n'est-ce pas?"

"With my whole heart and soul and life," she confessed.

And then he kissed her hastily, hungrily, murmuring:

"Ma cherie! my angel, mine, mine!"

She cried a little and laughed a little, looked up a little and looked down a little, tried to draw away from him and found herself drawn yet nearer; was kissed, and kissed him; was looked upon and returned the look; felt the strength of his love and felt the strength of her own; feeling at last that the wavelets of Lucerne which had splashed softly up against the stones at Zurich, and murmured in her ears at Constance, had been swelled by the current of the Isar into a mighty resistless storm that here, this day, upon the rocky coast of the Mediterranean, had come resistlessly roaring upwards, and, sweeping away all barriers, carried her heart and her life out into its bottomless depths forevermore.

"Attends!" he said, after a minute, loosing her suddenly to the end that he might turn the key in Jack's door; then he took her by the hand and led her to the chair where he had been sitting. It was one of those vast and luxurious fauteuils which have prevented the Old World from ever importing the rocker. He installed her in its depth and placed himself upon the broad and cushioned arm.

"Mon Dieu, que je suis heureux!" he said, smiling down into her eyes; "alors tu m'aimes vraiment?"

"Jack told me that you were terribly ill," she said, her eyes resting upon his face with a sort of overwhelming content.

"And you have care?"

"I thought that I should lose my mind!"

"Ma cherie!"

"But you really look as if you had been ill?"

"Not ill, but most malheureux. It has not been easy always to wait and believe that you shall love me yet."

"But you always did believe it?"

He smiled his irresistible smile of eyes and lip.

"Your cousin has said to me in Tagernsee, 'She will certainly marry you because she declares that she will not, and she always does do exactly le contraire;' but, Mon Dieu, how could I trust to that?"

Rosina laughed ringingly.

"Dear Jack! I wish that I had known myself as well as he knows me."

"He has been very good to me," said Von Ibn, leaning above her and breaking his sentences in a manner that was perhaps only natural, all things considered; "he has kept me from—the real madness. But for him I was quite willing to shoot myself. It has never been anything so terrible for me as—when you enter the door of the pension that night and shut it between us."

She lifted up her hand and closed his big eyes with its soft touch.

"I loved you in Lucerne," she declared to his blindness, "that first moment when I saw you walking on the Quai. I did not know why, but I felt that I must know you."

He snatched her hand away and laughed.

"Voila!" he exclaimed; "what have I say to you that time in Munich, that the women are always genees! You love in Lucerne, and insist not for all the summer after."

Then they laughed together.

"Would you have liked me to have told you there on the Quai? would you have believed it?"

"Yes," he said gravely; "I would have believed it very well, because I also knew the same. In the hotel I had seen you, and on the Promenade I said myself, 'Voila la jolie Americaine encore une fois!' You see!"

She wondered how she had ever for a moment thought that his eyes were melancholy, they appeared so big and bright and joyous now.

"When did you come?" she remembered to ask after a long time.

"I am come yesterday morning."

"Before we did?"

"Oh, yes; because I have very much here to do."

"In Genoa?"

"Yes; and Jack and I have been out all this morning also."

"And I never knew!"

He looked a little uneasy and rose to his feet.

"There is something very serious that I must say," he said, standing before her.

She looked up in a little anxiety; a crowd of ordinary, every-day thoughts suddenly swarmed into her mind.

"Do not be genee!" he implored parenthetically; "what I have to say is so most important."

"I am not genee," she assured him.

"Then why do you not come and stand by me?" he asked. "If you love me and will not show it, I am to be very unhappy always."

Rosina laughed; but she stood up and went close to him at once.

"I do love you," she said, "and I am not at all afraid to show it. You see!"

He took her face between his hands and gazed down fondly upon her.

"Love is good, is it not?" he said. "There is a great joy to me to hold you so, and reflect upon those stairs at Munich."

He paused—perhaps in consideration of the Munichian stairs—for a moment, and then said:

"I have heard that there is love so strong that it crushes; if I ever take hold of you so that your bones break, it is only that I think of the stairs in Munich."

She laughed again.

"I will remember," she said, not at all frightened.

He took her two hands tightly within his own.

"I must now say that very serious thing."

"But I shall not run away."

"No, but you may be surprised and unarrange yourself before I can hold you to stop."

"Go on," she begged.

"It is this: Jack and I have been out all this morning, because all must be very ready; I—" he stopped.

"You are going with us?" she exclaimed joyously.

"No; I—"

"You are not going before we do?"

He smiled and shook his head.

Then he drew her very closely and tenderly to him and kissed her eyes and forehead.

"It is that I am to be married to-morrow," he told her softly, and held her tightly as the shock of his words ran quivering through her.

"And I!" she gasped, after two or three paralyzed seconds.

"Naturally you are to be married also."

She stared mutely up into the reassurance of his smile.

"Jack and I find that best," he said. "I have no time to go to America to bring you again, and all is quite good arranged. I have telegraphed to Dresden about a larger apartment, and those papers from the lawyers in New York waited here when you came. We may not marry like peasants, you and I, you know."

She felt completely overcome.

"To-morrow!" she said, at last.

"Yes," he said placidly; "I am much hasted to be again in the north, and we have arranged with the consuls—your consul and my consul—for to-morrow."

"But my steamer passage!"

"Oh, that your cousin has given up; all the money has been returned. I think for a little that we will go with him as far as Naples, but I go and look at your stateroom this morning, and I have just a centimetre more than the berth."

Rosina was forced to laugh; her humor began to bubble riotously upwards at the notion of Von Ibn and Jack measuring the berth that morning. He did not know why she laughed, but he kissed her without caring.

"For me there is no comfort under two metres," he declared vigorously.

Just then the owner of the room tried the door.

"This is my room," he called through the crack.

They looked at each other, and she ran lightly to the door, unlocked it and let her cousin enter.

"You fearful liar!" she exclaimed, as he put his arm about her, and held out the spare hand to her lover. "Oh, Jack, you awful, awful liar, what shall I say to you?"

"Say to him that you are most happy," her lover suggested.

Jack was beaming.

"I never said a word that wasn't true," he declared. "You asked me if the letter was from him, and I said that he wasn't writing any letters these days, and then I said that he was going crazy."

"And that was most true," the other man broke in; "I have no manner to think left in my head these later nights."

"And you began to scream that you must go to him, and I told you that you could go; and I see that you went."

Von Ibn crossed to the chimney-piece and picked up a cigarette and a match. He was smiling to himself.

"She consents to be married to-morrow," he said, facing about.

"Yes," said Rosina airily; "I see that conventionality and I are to be more two than ever henceforth, so I am going to yield up my own way at once."

"You are a brave fellow," Jack said to his friend; "I have always been able to do more with her than any one else, but, honestly, I tell you that I, even I, would never dare to undertake her forever."

Von Ibn lit his cigarette and laughed.

"She will obey me," he said easily; "she will have to. It will be a great good for her. I shall be very tender with her and most severe, that is what is best for a woman."

"Oh, Rosina!" said Jack, and in his tone resounded a succession of many feelings each more indescribable than its predecessor.

"It is not needful that you kiss her," the lover went on, coming back across the room; "I wish that you would not, that does me no pleasure to watch."

"I don't care anything about kissing her," the cousin replied; "Rosina's novelty in kisses was over for me before I was five years old. Don't you remember—"

Some one rapped at the door.

"Entrez!" they cried in chorus.

It was a garcon with a card.

"'Madame La Francesca,'" said Rosina, reading. "Who is Madame La Francesca?"

The two men exchanged glances.

"Where is the lady?" Jack asked.

"She is gone at once to madame's room," the boy replied.

"You'd better go and see who's in your room," Jack suggested; "and you," he added, turning to her fiance, "you must come with me and attend to what yet remains to be done."

Rosina hesitated, her hand upon the door-knob.

"I will come at once," she told the boy, who was waiting, and then she looked towards the man by the chimney-piece.

"Never mind me," said her cousin kindly; "I'll look out of the window, if you wish."

Von Ibn threw his cigarette into the grate.

"You need not look from the window," he said, laughing; "you may look straight to us, and see two most happy."

He put his hand on either side of her smile and took the smile to himself. Then she went out.

"I can't tell you," the American said warmly, "how glad I am for you both. I do honestly think that she'll make you very happy. And I hope and pray that you'll be good to her."

"I shall be good to her," said his friend seriously; "I know her well. She is very 'tendre' and I love her much; she will not have her own will always, but with her love she will do mine. It is that that makes the life so happy with us. We give much affection and little liberty; it is not well for you, because with you all is so different. In America it is all liberty, and no time for love."

"Maybe not," said Jack carelessly; "but we make a lot of money all the same." He picked up his ulster with the deer-horn buttons. "You're coming, aren't you?" he said.

The other man sought an eminently correct overcoat and silk hat in the adjoining room.

"Naturlich," he said, "you know that I am of at any rate an equal interest with you in what is to be to-morrow."

Jack laughed.

"Perhaps if you knew your lady as well as I do—" he began, and then he stopped.

They went out to the staircase, and Von Ibn descended several steps in advance. Jack contemplated his back, and his lips twitched with the conquering of a rebellious smile.

"So there walks the end of all," he said to himself. "Who would have thought it of Rosina! Poor girl, she is about over; in fact, I'm afraid that, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, 'Rosina' has already ceased to exist—knocked under for good, so to speak. Only to think of that particular girl choosing a thorough-bred European husband with a Tartar syllable in his name!" He paused and chuckled. "I've proved my truth to Carter, anyhow. I told him that there was but one man in America clever enough to marry my cousin, and now he'll perceive that that man's brains so far surpass the brains of all others, that, although capable of marrying her, he took precious good care to marry her to another fellow. Well, if they're happy they owe it all to me; and if they're miserable, they have no one but themselves to blame."

Von Ibn had paused at the foot of the stairs and now looked up, smiling, into his friend's eyes.

"I am this day so greatly rejoiced," he said earnestly, "what life is to have for me, and for her, after this! You may not divine it, I think."

Jack looked into the warm and shining light of his uplifted face.

"I hope you'll both be just everlastingly happy," he said sincerely.

"But that is certain," the lover said, in a tone of deep feeling. "Did you look at her to-day? It is heaven she brings me with her. We were two in the great world, and Lucerne brought us to one. Then love did all the rest."

"Oh, I say," Jack remonstrated; "I certainly worked some too!"



Chapter Seventeen

When Rosina opened her door it was Molly who stood there; a gorgeous Molly, put forth by all that was uppermost in the Karntnerstrasse of that year.

"Why, where ever did you come from?" she cried.

"From Vienna," said Molly; "from Vienna by way of Botzen and Venice."

"And Madame la Princesse?"

"I've left her and qualified as a chaperone on my own hook."

"You're with Madame—Madame—" Rosina looked down at the carte-de-visite which she held in her fingers still.