in a somewhat milder tone, “it is very fine, the moonlight from the
University.”

When they were alone, he was silent and led her out of the crowded
garden down upon the Quai. It was a superb night, and the moon and its
golden beams were mirrored in the lake. Little waves came running
tranquilly across the shivering silver sheet and tossing themselves
gently up against the stone-sheathed bank; some merry boat-loads were
drifting out among the shadows, listening to the music from the shore
and sending a silver echo of laughter to join in its accords.

They walked on until something of their own tumult was stayed by the
stillness, and then Von Ibn said quietly:

“Tell me of what you were saying.”

“I was saying that you thought that I had remained here because of that
man, and yet it was really all an accident.”

He shrugged his shoulders slightly.

“But you are quite free,--and he seems very nice, and is of your own
country and all so agreeable.”

“I was really too tired to go to Constance, but--”

“Oh, madame, _je vous en prie_,” he interrupted, “no explanation is
needful. It does not interest me, I assure you.”

“I did not want to go to Constance until Thursday,” she went steadily
on; “but I could not stay here because--because--”

“Yes,” he interrupted, “all that I have understand,--I understand all.”

“So,” she continued, “I packed to go, and meant to go, and then when you
told me that you were leaving too, I thought that I might just as well
adhere to my--”

“What is ‘adhere’?” he broke in; “that word I have never known before.”

“It means--well--it means ‘stick to.’”

“Glue paste?”

She felt as if a clown had suddenly turned a somersault into the midst
of the death scene of Hamlet!

“Not glue paste,” she explained carefully; “of course, in one way, it
means the same thing; but I meant that when I knew that you were going,
I felt that I might just as well do as I had originally intended doing,
and remain here to rest a little.”

“And you repose by coming to the Tonhalle with a gentleman?” he asked in
a tone of smothered sarcasm.

“I met him this afternoon as I was walking--”

“Have you only know him first this afternoon?”

“_Monsieur!_” she cried in horror, “I came on the steamer with him from
New York, and he went to college with my cousin!”

Von Ibn gave another shrug.

“You tell everything very cleverly,” he remarked; “but, my dear madame,
we have too many difficulties,--it is always that between us, and--what
is your proverb?--no smoke without over a fire?--_Eh bien_, I begin to
grow weary.”

“Don’t you believe what I have just told you?” she demanded.

They were near the further end of the Quai where the crowd was thinnest
and the play of moonbeam and shadow most alluring. He stopped and looked
long upon the shining water, and then long upon her face.

“Yes,” he said at last, “I do believe.” He held out his hand, “I do
believe now, but I must tell you that truly if I had been of a
‘_tempérament jaloux_,’ I would have been very angry this night.
Yes,--of a surety.”

She looked away, with an impulse to smile, and her heart was
sufficiently eased of its burden to allow her to do so.

“Shall we go to the hotel now?” she asked after a moment.

“But you have not given me your hand?”

She put her hand in his, and he pressed it warmly, and then drew it
within his arm as they turned to retrace their steps.

“I like better to walk alone,” she said, freeing herself.

“You are, perhaps, still angry?” he inquired anxiously.

“No, but I can walk easier alone. And I want you to tell me now why you
are not _en route_ North, instead of staying here in Zurich.”

“But I have been North,” he said eagerly; “I have been this day to
Aârburg.”

“To Aârburg!--Where is that?”

“Wait, I will make all plain to you,” he looked down upon her with the
smile that always proclaimed a complete declaration of peace, “it all
went like this: I see so plain that I make you to leave before you like,
that I am glad to go away and so make you quite free. It came to my head
like this,--I wanted to know something and by looking at your face and
saying that I must go to Leipsic for some one there, I see all that I
wish to know--”

“What did you see?” Rosina interrupted.

“I see plainly that you think it is some lady--”

“I did not think any such a thing!” she cried hotly.

He laughed and tossed his head.

“And so as I really should go to Leipsic I take the train and go, and
then on the train I think why am I gone, and when I think again, I feel
to leave the train at Aârburg and telegraph, and when the answer come
that you are still here, I feel very strongly to return at once, and so
I do.”

Rosina looked up with a smile, and, meeting his eyes, was suddenly
overcome with a fear, vague and undefined, it is true, but not the less
real, as to whether she had been wise in bringing about this most
complete reconciliation.

“But you must still go to Leipsic?” she asked presently.

“Yes, after a little.”

“I wish you had gone when you started.”

“Why?”

“I am sure that you, who always understand, know why.”

“After a while will do,” he said easily, “when we are more tired of
ourselves.” He paused. “Perhaps Thursday,” he suggested.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, in spite of herself.

“Why ‘oh’?”

“You are so positive that we shall be _ennuyés_ by Thursday.”

“Yes,” he replied tranquilly, “we see so much of us together that it
cannot last long so. Indeed it was for that that I was quite willing to
go to-day, but on the train I begin to think otherwise, and my otherwise
thoughts are become so strong that I find myself obliged to get down at
Aârburg.”

“And Leipsic?”

“Ah, for that you were so charming to send for me to-night and tell me
how all has been I will tell you all the truth of Leipsic. It is there
that my professor lives, the man who has teach me all that I know. He is
to me the most dear out of all the world, for he gave to me my music,
which is my life and my soul. And so you may understand that I speak
truth indeed when I say that I have much interest in Leipsic.”

Rosina nodded, a sympathetic smile upon her lips.

“But we must go back to the hotel now,” she said sadly; “it is nearly
ten o’clock.”

“And I may come to-morrow morning and we shall make a promenade
together, _n’est-ce pas_?” he said eagerly; “it is so good, you and I
together, these days. How can I make you know how I feel if you have not
the same feeling,--the feeling that all the clouds and all the grass are
singing, that all about us is perfect accord of sound, when we are only
free to laugh and to talk as we may please.”

“But I ought to go on to my friends to-morrow,” she said, “you must know
that.”

“But I will go there.”

“To Constance?”

“Yes, surely.”

“Oh, monsieur, that will not do at all!”

“Why will it not do at all?”

“I don’t want you following me to Constance as you did to Zurich.”

“But I will not follow you; I will this time go on the same train with
you.”

“Oh,” she said, in despair at the wide space between his views and those
of the world in general, “you cannot do that, it would not look well at
all.”

He stared at her in surprise.

“Who will it look unwell to?”

“Don’t say ‘unwell,’ say ‘not well.’”

“Not well; who will see it not well?”

“Ah,” she said, shaking her head, “there is no telling who would see
only too well, and that is just the trouble.”

Von Ibn knit his black brows.

“I do not understand that just,” he said, after a moment. And then he
reflected further and added, “You are of an oddness so peculiar. Why
must the world matter? I am my world--nothing matters to me. _Vous êtes
tortillante!_ you are afraid of stupid people and the tongues they have
in them. That is your drollness. And anyway, I may go to Constance if I
will. I may go anywhere if I will. You cannot prevent.”

She looked off across the lake.

“You ought to want to do what pleases me,” she suggested.

“But I do not,” he said vigorously; “I want to do what pleases me, and
you must want it too,--it will be much better for America when all the
women do that. I observe much, and I observe especially in particular
that. An American woman is like a queen--she does her own wish always,
and is always unhappy; in Europe she does her husband’s wish, and it is
much better for her and very good for him, and they are very happy, and
I am coming to Constance.”

“But I have no husband,” said Rosina insistently.

“It will be very good if you learn to obey, and then you can have one
again.”

“But I never mean to marry again.”

“I never mean to marry once, _surtout pas une Americaine_.”

She felt hurt at this speech and made no reply.

“But I mean to come to Constance.”

“Monsieur, you say that we see too much of one another; then why do you
want to drive our acquaintance to the last limits of boredom?”

“But you do not bore me,” he said; and then after a long pause he added,
“yet.”

She was forced to feel that the “y” in “yet” had probably begun with a
capital.

“I want to go to the hotel now,” she said, in a tired tone.

“Let us go and get an ice or some coffee first; yes?”

“Don’t keep saying ‘yes’ that way,” she cried impatiently; “you know
how it frets me.”

He took her arm gently.

“You are indeed fatigued,” he said in a low tone, “I have troubled you
much to-night. But I have trouble myself too. Did you see how unhappy I
was, and was it so that you sent for me? _Dites-moi franchement_.”

“Yes,” she answered, with simplicity.

“And why did you care?”

“I didn’t want you to think what I knew that you were thinking.”

“Did you care that I was unhappy?”

“I cared that you thought that I would lie.”

“I was quite furious,” he meditated; “I came from the train so late and
found that you were gone out. _Je ne me fâche jamais sans raison_,--but
I had good reason to-night.”

“You had no right to be angry over my going out, and I had just as much
cause for displeasure over your returning as you had over my going.”

“No,” he said quickly, “for it was a compliment to you that I return,
and no compliment at all to me that you stay after I am gone so as to
visit the concert with monsieur.”

She laughed a little.

“I hope that you will never behave so again; you were so unbearably rude
that I was sorry to have sent for you. If I had not,” she asked, with
real curiosity, “if I had not, would you have spoken to me after a
while?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“_Je ne sais pas_,” he replied with brevity; and then looking down at
her with one of his irresistible smiles he added, “but I find it
probable.”

She smiled in return, saying:

“Do undertake to never be angry like that again.”

“Again!” he said quickly and pointedly; “then I _may_ come to
Constance?”

Her mind was forced to take a sudden leap in order to rejoin his rapid
deduction of effect from cause.

“No, no,” she cried hastily, “you must not think any more of Constance,
you must go to Leipsic, just as you intended doing.”

“But you said--” he began.

“I meant, in the future, if we should ever chance to meet by accident.”

His brow darkened.

“Where?” he asked briefly.

“Who can tell,” she answered cheerfully; “people are always meeting
again. See how that man of the steamer met me again to-day.”

“But you have hear of him since you come?” he demanded, a fresh shade of
suspicion in his tone.

“Never! Never a word until he came out of the Promenade and spoke to me
this afternoon.”

Von Ibn thought about it frowningly for a little and then decided it was
not worth his pains.

“I would not care to meet again as he,” he declared carelessly; “how he
was sent to fetch me, and then he must go alone while we speak together,
and then make that tale of a drive when there was no drive by the
University, only a knowledge that he was much not wanted.”

“Do you think he was not really invited to go to drive?” she asked,
opening her eyes widely.

“Of a certainty not. But he could see he was not wanted by us. When he
came near, you really looked to weep.”

“Oh, _no_!” she cried, in great distress.

“Yes; it was just so.”

There was a pause while she pondered this new phase of herself, and
after a while he went on:

“There is something that I do not understand. Why do you desire so much
to speak to me to-night and then not desire me at Constance? _Ça--je ne
le comprends pas!_”

“You do understand,” she said; “I know you do, and you know that I know
that you do.”

He looked at her for a few seconds and then asked:

“How long are you in Constance?”

“I do not know.”

“And then where do you go?”

“Probably to Munich.”

“With always that Molly?”

“I do not know whether they will go there or not. I believe they are
going to Bayreuth and then to Berlin.”

He reflected for the space of half a block.

“I should really go to Leipsic,” he said at last.

“Then why don’t you go?” she retorted, more in answer to his tone than
to his speech.

“I might perhaps go to Leipsic while you are in Constance,--_perhaps_.”

Heavy emphasis on the last “perhaps.”

“Oh, do!” she pleaded.

“Are you going to Bayreuth?”

“No, I don’t think so; they all come down to Munich right afterwards,
you know.”

“But it is not the same in Munich. If you had been in Bayreuth you would
know that. It is not the same at all. And ‘Parsifal’ is only there.”

He paused, but she made no answer.

“I am going to Bayreuth,” he said, “and then I shall come to Munich.”

He made the last statement with an echo of absolute determination, but
she continued to keep silence.

“In Munich I shall see you once more?”

“Perhaps.”

“Where will you be?”

She told him.

“And I shall be in the ‘Vierjahreszeiten’; why do you not come there?”
he added.

“Because I love the _pension_ with my whole heart,” she declared
fervently; “I was there for an entire winter before my marriage; it is
like home to me.”

He stopped, pulled out his note-book and carefully wrote down the name
and address; as he put it up again, he remarked:

“That was droll, what you said to-night, that you would never marry
again! Where do you get that idea?”

“From being married once.”

“I have it from never being married any, and I have it very strong. Have
you it very strong?”

“Yes,” said Rosina decidedly, “very strong indeed.”

“Then when we know all is only nothing, why may I not come to
Constance?”

“Because you can’t,” she said flatly, “I don’t want you to come.”

“But I will be very good, and--”

“Yes,” she said interrupting; “I know, but to prevent further
misunderstanding, I may just as well tell you that I want all my time in
Constance for my other friend--”

They were at the door of the hotel, and she had her foot upon the lower
step; he was just behind her, his hand beneath her elbow. She felt him
give a violent start and drop his hand, and, looking around quickly to
see what had happened, she forgot to end her sentence in the emotion
caused by the sight of his face. A very fury of anger had surcharged his
eyes and swelled the veins upon his temples.

“So!” he said, in a low tone that almost shook with intense and angry
feeling, “that is why I may not come! He goes, does he? _Bête que je
suis_, that I did not comprehend before!”

Rosina stared at him, motionless, for the space of perhaps ten seconds,
and then an utter contempt filled her, and every other consideration
fled.

She ran up two or three steps, crossed the hall, and passed the
_Portier_ like a flash, flew up the one flight of stairs that led to her
corridor, and broke in upon Ottillie with a lack of dignity such as she
was rarely guilty of.

“Ottillie,” she exclaimed, panting under the weight of many mixed
feelings, “I want to leave for Constance by the first train that goes in
the morning. I don’t care if it is at six o’clock, I’ll get up. Ring and
find out about everything, and then see to the bill and all. I _must_
go!”

Ottillie stood there, and her clever fingers were already unfastening
her mistress’ hat-pins.

“Madame may rest assured,” she said quietly, “all shall be as she
desires.”

Meanwhile below stairs Von Ibn had entered the café, lit a cigarette and
taken up one of the evening journals.

He appeared to look over the pages of the latter with an interest that
was intent and unfeigned.

But was it so?

Chapter Nine

“I shall certainly not tell Molly one word about these latest
developments,” Rosina said firmly to herself, and she remade the
resolution not once but a hundred times during the train ride of that
early Wednesday morning. She was too tired from excess of emotion, and
no balance of much-needed sleep, to feel anything but unhappy over the
termination of the preceding evening.

Everything was over now, and the only glory to be reaped in any
direction would be the dignified way in which Molly should be kept in
ignorance of all that had occurred.

Outside, the freshness of a Suabian morning lay over valley and
mountain. The country was beautiful with the charm of midsummer’s
immediate promise, which spread over the fields of ripening grain and
lost itself among the threading rivulets, or in the shadow of forest and
mountain. The white-plastered farmhouses with the stable-door at one
end, the house-door at the other, and the great sweep of straw-thatched
roof sloping down over all, peeped out from among their surrounding
fruit-trees. Old, old women knit peacefully under the shadow of the
stone-bound well, and little, little children tumbled about their knees
in the grass. Out in the garden at one side the boys and girls were busy
gathering berries or vegetables for the market of next day. Yokes of
oxen passed slowly to and fro upon the shaded roads, their high,
two-wheeled carts loaded to the very top; beside a pond a maiden herded
geese; upon a hill a boy lay sleeping, his sheep nibbling the herbage
near by. It was all quaint and picturesque, and to the American eyes
surpassing strange to see, but those two particular American eyes before
which all the panorama was displayed, happened just then to be blind to
everything except one vivid spirit-photograph, and grew moist each time
that they pictured that afresh.

“No, I shall not tell Molly one word,” she repeated mentally; “I can’t
tell her part,--I won’t tell her all,--so I just shan’t tell her
anything,” and then she stared sightlessly out of the wide-open window,
and knew not that it was the dregs of her own evaporated anger which
veiled the sunlit landscape in a dull-gray mist.

The train came slowly in by the banks of the Bodensee, and halted at the
Kaufhaus soon after eleven o’clock. The Kaufhaus is that delightful old
building where Huss was tried before the great Council. Built for a
warehouse, it is now again a warehouse, Huss and his heresy having been
but a ripple on the tranquil centuries of its existence.

Molly (who had been telegraphed to) was at the Gare to meet her friend,
and managed to smother her surprise over the sudden turn of events with
complete success.

“Let the maid take the boxes to the hotel,” she said, after having
greeted the traveller, “and you and I will just have a nice drive before
dinner, and a good long nap right afterwards.”

Rosina submitted to be led passively to a cab, and the strength of her
resolution was such that before they reached the spot where Huss was
burnt, Molly was in possession of the last detail as to the preceding
evening. She said never a word in reply, being much engaged in looking
out of the side of the cab to see if she could see the monument, an
action which struck her unhappy friend as heartless in the extreme. When
they drew up beside the iron fence, both got out and peered between the
bars at the huge ivy-covered boulder within the enclosure.

“Was he burned _on_ this stone?” Molly called to the cabman in German;
“now why does he laugh, do you suppose?” she asked in English of Rosina.

“Oh,” the latter replied wearily, “you used the word for ‘fried,’
instead of the word ‘burned,’ but it doesn’t matter,” she added with a
heavy sigh.

“I wonder whether he was looking towards the woods or towards the town
when they lighted him!” Molly pursued with real interest.

Rosina felt that such talk was horribly frivolous, her own tale of woe
considered, and made no reply; so they went back to the cab, and then
Molly clasped her hands in her lap and became serious.

“I would forget all about him, if I was you,” she said; “you will never
get any satisfaction out of a man who is always going in for jealous
rages like that.”

Rosina felt with a shock that Molly was of a nature more intensely
unsympathetic than any which she had hitherto encountered. She looked at
the Rhine, wondered if it flowed past Leipsic, and wished that she had
kept to her original determination and said nothing at all about any of
it.

“I’m glad that I did as I did,” she said, with an effort to speak in a
tone of indifference (the effort was a marked failure). “I’m sure that
I want to forget him badly enough,” she added, and swallowed a choke.

Molly put her hand upon hers and nodded.

“Certainly, my dear; it was the only thing to do with a man like that.
You explained once, and once is enough, for one night, surely. Forget
him now and be happy again.”

“Don’t let us talk about it any more,” said Rosina, feeling bitterly
that Molly lightly demanded oblivion of her when all her inclinations
were towards tears.

They drove some distance in silence, and then Rosina said slowly:

“Do you suppose that I shall ever see him again now?”

“Yes, if you want to. One always sees the men again that one wants to
see again.”

“Are you sure?”

“I never knew it to fail.”

“How does that happen?”

“I don’t know why it is, but it always does happen. Effect of mental
telepathy, perhaps. The man knows that he is to be given another chance,
and comes to get it, I fancy.”

“But Monsieur von Ibn is so _very_ singular!”

“Every man is singular!”

“My husband wasn’t. And he wasn’t ever the least bit jealous,” she
stopped to sigh. “I like jealous men!” she added.

“Yes,” said Molly, dryly, “so I observed.”

“He never lost his temper either,” Rosina continued. “We never had
anything to make up. And making up is so delicious. Oh, me!” she sighed,
and her eyes filled with tears again.

“Never mind,” said Molly, consolingly, “you’ll soon be making it up this
time.”

“Don’t you think,” said Rosina, slowly, “that he ought to have sent some
sort of an apology last night; it could have been put under the door, no
matter how late it was, you know?”

“He isn’t that sort of a man, I fancy.”

“But his behavior was so unpardonable!”

“Yes, but he doesn’t see that.”

“Then I don’t care if I never do meet him again,” Rosina exclaimed
passionately, and the next instant she burst into tears. “He’s so
interesting,” she sobbed; “and his way of speaking is such an
everlasting joy to me; and he never means to marry; and I never mean to
marry; and I know that he really cared a great deal about me; and now
it’s--all--all over!”

Molly leaned over and kissed her, drew a comforting arm around her
waist, and gave her an affectionate squeeze.

“Don’t take it so awfully to heart, my dear,” she whispered soothingly;
“we all have troubles of one kind, if not of another. Here’s a long
letter come by the morning post from my dear gray-caped lieutenant, and
it’s just full of the worst sort of desperation over our mutual affairs.
He knows that we can’t possibly marry without a certain amount of money,
which we have neither of us got, and so there you are!”

“How much is it?” Rosina asked dully. She felt that she ought to try and
make an effort to interest herself in the lives of others, even if her
own had so completely crashed in.

“Oh, it’s something awful in pounds, but in those Italian _lire_!--why,
it’s not to be thought of for a moment. He thinks that he had best chuck
up the army and take me to America instead!”

“Oh, Molly, don’t let him do that! We haven’t any Italians in America
except organ-grinders and miners, and the Ambassador, of course!”

“I knew it wouldn’t do,” said the Irish girl. Then she shrugged her
shoulders and laughed.

“But then I never did intend to marry him, anyhow!”

They drove back to the hotel, and Rosina’s eyes were fairly presentable
when the _Portier_ came out to receive them.

“There is a letter just come for madame,” he said, as they entered the
Kreuzgang; “it is in the office; I will bring it at once.”

“There!” Molly whispered, “do you see!”

Rosina trembled slightly as she held out her hand and saw the hotel
stamp of Zurich on the envelope. Then she tore it open and pulled out
the single folded sheet contained therein.

It was her bill, receipted, which Ottillie had let fall in the haste of
their early departure!

Madame la Princesse Russe having a migraine that afternoon, the two
friends had the pleasure of a tête-á-tête dinner at half-past six. They
sat by one of the great windows of what used to be the chapel of the
monastery, but is now the dining-room of the Inselhaus, and enjoyed the
sweet lake breeze, while their tongues ran delightfully. Rosina,
liberally refreshed by a long nap, and mightily reinforced as to her
pride by the last terrific blow of the letter, was in the best possible
spirits, and her gayety quite rivalled, if it did not surpass, that of
her companion.

As the waiter was removing the salad, a shadow fell suddenly athwart the
floor at their side, and Molly, looking quickly upward, beheld--the man!

He was in evening dress, calm, cool, and smiling, and neither the
surprised face of the one, nor the violent start of the other shook his
composure in the least.

“_Vous allez bien, mesdames?_” he asked politely, and then, speaking to
the waiter with authority:

“Lay another place here,” he said, indicating the end of the small
table, “for I shall dine with you, _n’est-ce pas_?” he added, looking
straight at Rosina.

She appeared to have been stricken suddenly dumb, and was so evidently
incapable of speech that Molly came boldly to the front with the
un-original remark:

“When _did_ you come?”

“By Schaffhausen, that _train-rapide_ that does go so fast. I had been
more wise to have come this morning by the train as madame, for this
afternoon the tourists were very terrible--also the heat.”

“Was it dusty?” she went on.

“I believe you well that it was. And you,” he continued, turning to
Rosina, who sat helplessly staring at her plate, and was very pale
except for a crimson spot on either cheek, “had you a pleasant ride?”

“No, she hadn’t,” said her faithful friend; “she arrived all used up.”

“You were made too tired, and do not feel well?” he asked, addressing
the scarlet cheeks again; “truly, you look much so. What has arrived in
Zurich to make you like that?”

He put the question in a tone the intensity of which forced her to lift
her eyes to his. Molly did not see the glance, for the infinitude of her
own experiences led her to find the moment favorable for gazing out of
the window in a sort of rapt admiration for the Insel rose-bushes in the
foreground and the placid Bodensee beyond.

It was the waiter who jarred them all three back to the knowledge of
mundane things by bringing soup for the latest arrival and ices for his
two companions.

“Ah, now I may eat!” the gentleman exclaimed in a tone of deep
satisfaction, and began at once.

“You must not be surprised over me,” he said to Molly, with a slight
smile.

“I was not surprised,” she reassured him.

“Because I have not eaten to-day before,” he explained.

“Really?”

“Yes, of a truthfulness. I am most _drôle_ as that. I may never eat when
I am much troubled.”

“Dear me, have you been troubled to-day?”

He looked at Rosina, whose face blazed yet deeper.

“I have said that I may not eat,” he repeated simply.

Molly laid down her spoon and glanced out of the window again. Her
feminine instinct divined what was to be.

“And madame your friend, she is not ill, I hope?” he inquired politely,
as the waiter removed his soup.

“No,” said the Irish girl, slowly, “or--that is,--yes, yes, she is.”

“And you must go at once to her,” he cried, springing up to draw back
her chair, “I am so sad for that.”

Molly rose to her feet.

“I’m sorry, too,” she said, nodding a smiling thanks; “but you see I’ve
no choice.” And then she went coffee-less away to laugh alone
above-stairs.

Von Ibn sat down again and ate his fish in silence. He did not appear
greatly perturbed over the twin-silence which was opposite him, rather
seeming to reflect upon the fresh reconciliation which was building
itself on such a substantial foundation of blushes.

Finally, when the fish was gone, he leaned somewhat forward and spoke
very low.

“_Oh, que j’étais malheureux hier le soir!_” he said in a tone that
trembled with feeling; “you can figure to yourself nothing of what it
was! And this morning--when I send and find that you are gone!--I must
know then that you were very furious of me.”

She raised her eyes, but to the window, not to him.

“I was,” she said briefly, but not the less tensely.

“When you are run last night--on the stairs like that, you know!--it
should have been amusing to see you run so fast; but I was not any
amused whatever. But why did you run?” he questioned, interrupting
himself; “did you think to leave me always then, there, forever? For an
instant I had the idea to go after you, but the _Portier_ was there, and
I have thought, ‘What may he think?’”

“Oh,” she exclaimed, distressedly, “I altogether forgot him! What do you
suppose he did think?”

Von Ibn shrugged his shoulders.

“_Rien du tout_,” he said easily; “he has think most probably that you
have lost something from you--a pin or a button, you know. When a woman
runs so, that is what every one knows.”

“Do they?”

“_Natürlich!_ I always know.”

“Oh!”

He finished his dinner in short order and then looked a smiling inquiry
into her eyes.

“We shall go now on to the terrace for the coffee; yes?” he asked as he
rose, and she rose too and went with him to where their little table was
spread among the dusk and the roses. The band in the Stadtgarten was
playing delightfully, and its sweetness came across water and park to
search out their very souls. The Bodensee spread all beyond in a gray
peace that seemed to bid the very leaves upon the trees to slumber. The
steamers were coming to their harbor rest in answer to the flaming
summons flung them by the searchlight at the head of the pier. They
glided in in slow procession, shivered at anchor, and submitted to the
lulling of the lake’s night breath.

Von Ibn rested his elbow on the table and his chin upon his hand. He
looked dreamily out across the water for a long time before saying:

“You pardon my impoliteness then of last night? I am not come to trouble
you here, only to ask that, and something else, and then I go again at
once.”

“Yes, I will pardon you,” said Rosina gently. She too was looking
thoughtfully out into the twilight on the water. “Only don’t do so
again.”

“It is that that I would ask,” he went on, looking always at the lake,
never at her; “that is what I would beg of you. Let us promise
sincerely--let us take a vow never to be angry again. I have suffer
enough last night both with my own anger and from yours. I will believe
what you may tell me. And let us never be angry so again.”

“It is you who are so unreasonable,” she began.

“No,” he interrupted quickly, “not unreasonable. _Jamais je ne me fâche
sans raison!_”

“Yes, you do too. Just think of last night, you were twice angry for
nothing at all. It was terrible!”

He stared afar and seemed to reflect doubly.

“He was _bête_, that man,” he said at last.

“He wasn’t either. He was very nice; I don’t know how I should have
gotten along coming over if I had not had him on the steamer to amuse
me.”

“You could have done very well without him at Zurich,” said Von Ibn
doggedly; “myself, I did not like him the first minute that I see him.”

“When did you first see him?”

“He was there at the table beside you.”

Rosina laughed a little. He turned towards her and smiled.

“Then you will forgive me?”

“Yes, this one time more. But never, never again.”

He turned to the lake and consumed five minutes in assimilating her
remark. Then his look came back to her.

“I was awake so much last night that my eyes burn me; do they show it?”

She looked into his eyes, and they burned indeed--burned with a latent
glow that forced her own to lower their lids.

“Do they look strangely to you?” he asked.

“No,” she said in a low tone.

“That is odd, because in all my life they have never look at any one as
they look at you to-night.”

She drew herself together suddenly.

“Don’t talk foolishly,” she said distinctly.

“That was no foolishness; it is true.”

“It is just the sort of thing that all men say, and I like you because
you do not say things like all other men.”

“Do all other men say to you that?”

“Not just that, but its equivalents. Men in general are not very
original.”

He took out his cigarette case and contemplated its bas-relief of two
silver nymphs for several seconds.

“You may,” said his companion, smiling.

“May what?”

“May smoke.”

“But I am going to, anyway.”

“Oh.”

He looked at her with an air of remonstrance.

“This is not your parlor,” he reminded her.

“No,” she said meekly; “I stand corrected.”

He lit the cigarette and threw the match into a rose-bush.

“I think that I will go and find Molly,” she suggested presently.

“Why?”

“I think that she would be able to leave madame by this time.”

“But if she can leave her then she will come to us, and I do not want
her; do you?”

“I always want her.”

“That is absurd. Why do you want her? I never want another man when we
speak together.”

“But I am very fond of Molly.”

“So am I most affectionate of my professor in Leipsic, but I never once
have wished for him when I was with you.”

“That’s different.”

“No, it is quite one. Do not go for mademoiselle; I have something to
say to you, and there is only to-night to say it.”

“What is it?”

“It is that I have really to go away. This time I must. I go to-morrow
morning without fail.”

“I am so glad,” she exclaimed.

“Yes,” he said, with a quick glance; “is it really so that my going
makes you pleasure? Truly I only come in return for your kindness of
last night--when you send for me, you know. I think that I wish to
repay. But now, if we are quite friends, I must go very early to-morrow
in the morning.”

“I am glad that you are going,” she said quietly, “and you know why. And
I shall be glad when we meet again,” she added in a lighter tone.

Then a long silence fell between them, while to their ears came the
famous symphony of a famous composer. When the music ceased he spoke
again.

“You will write to me?”

“I am not a letter writer.”

“But you will send me a few lines sometimes?”

“Are you going to write me?”

“_Si vous voulez de mes nouvelles._”

“Yes, I do.”

“I will tell you,” he said, tossing his cigarette into the lake; “I will
send you a post-card, as I tell you before--you recall? yes.”

“No,” said Rosina, with decision, “I don’t want post-cards; you can
write me in an envelope or not at all.”

He looked at her thoughtfully.

“I have some very small paper,” he said at last, “I can use that; I use
it to write my family on.”

She almost laughed.

“That will be all right,” she said, “and I will answer on my
correspondence-cards. They only hold half a dozen lines, and they have
my monogram on them and are really very pretty.”

“You can write on the back too,” he suggested.

“I shan’t have any more to say than will go easily on the front,
though.”

“And I shall see you next in August in Munich?”

“_Espérons!_” with a smile.

He stood up suddenly.

“Let us walk to the Garten,” he suggested; “it is good to walk after
dinner a little.”

She rose too, very willingly, and they went towards the bridge that
connects the Insel with the mainland.

“Did you love your husband?” he asked as they passed above the moat-like
stream.

“Tremendously.”

“For long?”

“Until after we were married.”

He halted short at that.

“It was too bad to stop just then.”

Rosina felt that there were safer places to pause than there on the
railroad tracks, and went on to the other side.

“It was too bad to stop at all,” she said, when he came too.

“_Assurément._”

They walked along the bank and came into the Stadtgarten, full of people
laughing and talking with the liveliness that is so pleasant to see and
so difficult, apparently, to import, unless it be in the steerage.
Perhaps it is the Custom House which takes all the gayety out of the
First and Second Classes before they can get ashore in America.

“We shall have to say our parting very soon,” the man said presently;
“we have both travelled to-day, and I must go in a very early hour
to-morrow.”

“Yes,” she replied, “I am much more weary to-night even than I was last
night.”

“If we are tired we might again have trouble,” suggested her companion
wisely. Then he added quickly, “But, no, never again,--I have promise
that.”

“Shall we not return to the hotel now?” she asked.

“But why will you go back so quick?” he asked in an injured tone; “do
you want to be so soon alone?”

“I thought that you wanted to be.”

“I want to sit down and not walk ever,” he said, pausing by an empty
table in the open-air café. “What made you stop?” he went on, looking at
her, she having paused where he did, naturally.

“I stopped because you did.”

“Because I did! that has no sense.”

“Then I’ll go on alone,” and she moved away.

He rejoined her in three steps, laughing.

“Why do you walk off like that?” he demanded.

“Because you said that there was no sense in my stopping.”

He looked at her in great amusement.

“_Que vous êtes tordante!_ I asked you why you stopped loving your
husband?”

She stared.

“Why, it’s ever so long since we were speaking of that. How funny you
are!”

He turned her back towards the empty table.

“Let us sit down here and talk, it may be the last time for long.”

She hesitated, thinking of Molly.

“It is so nice here,” he declared, persuasively; “only for a few minutes
we stay.”

She sat down forthwith; he followed suit. A maid came and took his
order, and then he clasped his hands upon the table before him and was
still, appearing to be overtaken by some sudden and absorbing train of
thought.

After a little the music recommenced, and his soul returned to his eyes
with a quick upblazing light. He reached out his hand and touched hers.

“Listen!” he exclaimed imperatively; “you go to learn something now. Pay
much notice.”

The violins of the orchestra were pouring forth their hearts in a sweet
treble song, whose liquid liaisons flowed high above the background of a
dark monotony of single chords. The air was singularly full of feeling,
and reached forth its individual pleading to each individual listener.

“You have hear that?” he whispered with a smile.

“Never,” she whispered in return.

“You shall wait a little,” he murmured, resting his chin on his hand and
turning his eyes on the lake again; “in a moment you shall hear.”

At that instant the song appeared to terminate, and bass and treble ran
together in long, sweeping arpeggios; and then, out over the merry
crowd, out over the infinite peace of the Bodensee, there rang and
resounded four notes,--E, F, F sharp, G; four notes, the pain, the
prayer, the passion of which shrieked to the inmost mysteries of every
hearing heart.

Rosina started; her companion turned quickly towards her.

“It is what you told me of at Lucerne that night on the steamer?” she
asked, with no question in her voice.

He moved his head slowly in assent to her certainty. The cascading song
was already running its silvery course again; he leaned far towards her.

“Have you comprehend, do you think?” he asked.

She nodded. And then she too leaned her chin on her hand, and looked to
the lake to guard her eyes, while the music invaded and took complete
possession of her senses.

“Do you play that on your violin?” she asked, when all was over.

“There is no music that I may not play,” he replied, “unless I have
never see it, or hear it, or divine it for myself.”

“Do you play the piano also?”

“Only what I must. Sometimes I must, you know. Then I say to my hands,
‘You shall go here, you shall go there!’ and they go, but very badly.”

She looked straight at him with a curious dawning in her eyes.

“I wonder, shall we ever make any music together?” she murmured.

“Much,” he said tritely.

She was conscious of neither wonder nor resistance, as if the music had
cast a spell over her self-mastery.

“I want to hear you play,” she said, with an echo of entreaty.

He shook his head, brushing a lock of hair off of his temple as he did
so. There was a sort of impatience in each movement.

“Not these days; no! I played once after I saw you first, but only once.
Since that the case is locked; the key is here.” He interrupted himself
to draw out his keys, and separating one from the rest held it up to
her. “Let us hope that in Munich, perhaps.”

The waitress had returned with their ices. He watched her arrange them,
and she watched him. The heavy circle under his eyes was especially
noticeable this night, the eyes themselves especially laughless.

“You are glad that I go?” he asked suddenly as he picked up his spoon
and plunged it into the saucer before him; “yes?”

“I shall be more glad when I know that you are really gone.”

“But this time it is sure. This time it is really a true going.” He
stopped and broke a piece of cake into tiny morsels, pushing them
together into a neat little pile. “Why were you unhappy in your
husband?” he asked slowly.

“He drank,” she replied.

“Perhaps he was unhappy?”

“Perhaps.”

“And you?”

“Beyond a doubt.”

He took another bit of cake and crumbed that up as he had the first.

“Don’t do that.”

“Why shall I not?” with an air of surprise.

“It isn’t right.”

“But I shall pay for it,” he said remonstrantly.

“It’s bad manners, anyhow.”

“What does it matter if I like, and pay for it too?”

“Well, then, if you must know, it makes me horribly nervous!”

He looked at her quickly.

“Are you nervous?”

“Yes, when people waste cake like that.”

He sighed and stopped his play.

“Did you ever love after?” he asked presently.

“No, never! Good Heavens, once was enough!”

“Was your husband so very bad?”

“He wasn’t bad at all; he was only disagreeable.”

“Perhaps he made you nervous?” he queried.

“Perhaps,” she answered dryly.

There was a long, long pause. The band now played “_Doch Einer Schoner
Zeit_,” and some peasants in the native costume sang the words.

Finally he pushed his plate away and crossed his arms upon the table;
his eyes were very earnest.

“Once I loved,” he said; “I have speak of that to you before.”

She made no reply.

“It was no passion of a whole life, but for a boy, as I was then, it was
much. I was quite young, and, _Gott_! how I _did_ love! She was such a
woman as says, ‘I will make this man absolutely mad;’ and she did so.
She made me crazy--_tout-à-fait fou_; and then, when I could only
breathe by her eyes, she showed me that she was uncaring!”

He stopped, stared sightlessly out at the black water beyond, and then
turned towards her.

“Is it so in _your_ mind towards me?” he asked, and in his voice and
eyes was that heartrending pathos which once in a lifetime a man’s soul
may come to share with childhood’s heavy sorrows.

She drew a quick breath. The pointed roofs of the Inselhaus off there
beyond the trees printed themselves darkly and forever upon her brain;
the scattered lights in the windows, the inky spots where the ivy
trailings were massed thickest,--all those details and a dozen others
were in that instant photographed upon her spirit, destined to
henceforth form the background to the scene whose centre was the face
opposite to her, all of the expression of which seemed to have condensed
itself into the burning gaze of those two great eyes, so vastly sad.

“Oh, monsieur,” she said, with a tone of deep appeal, “believe me, I
have never done so cruel a thing as that in all my life!”

“Are you to all men as to me?”

“I hope so.”

“That American in Zurich! when you met him again was it as to meet me
again?”

“But he is no especial friend of mine.”

“And am I especial?--Am I?--Yes?”

“Yes,” she said slowly, “I feel as if I had known you all my life.”

“Yes,” he answered quickly, “just so I feel also.”

He put up his hand and again brushed the loose lock of his wavy hair
back from his forehead.

“_Vraiment_,” he exclaimed, “I begin to feel that it is impossible that
I go to-morrow.”

“Oh, but you must,” she cried, much alarmed.

“We are so happy; why can we not let this pleasure last?”

“You _must_ go!” she reiterated with decision.

“We understand so well,” he went on, without noticing her words; “you
understand, I understand. I wish nothing of you, I require nothing of
you, only the friendship--only these good hours that we know together,
only the joy of our sympathy. Why can I not be where you are everywhere?
_Warum nichts_?”

“It isn’t possible!” she said firmly.

He turned about in his seat and called for the reckoning. After it was
paid they went together back towards the hotel.

“You have told me that you will never marry again,” he said presently,
“and I have told you that I also intend never. But--” he stopped short.
The hotel court was there before them, and the scent of some night
flowers came on the evening breeze from those beds of riotous color
which fill the central space of the old Cloister.

“Let us walk once around the Kreuzgang,” he suggested, “and after that
we will go in.”

She assented, and they followed the vivid outline of Constance’s history
as portrayed in the large frescoes upon the inner wall of the vaulted
passage.

“I do not breathe here,” he said suddenly; “come into the garden with me
once again. But for a moment? I beg--I pray!”

They went out on to the terrace, passing through the Refectory, now
thick with smoke and scintillating with beer-steins.

“You say that you will never marry,” he said again, as they encircled
the base of Huss’ Tower, “and I tell you that I also have the idea to
never marry. But--”

He paused again, just by that bit of the old monastery wall which
extends out towards the bathing-houses.

“But if--_if_,” he emphasized the monosyllable with marked
emphasis,--“_if_ I asked you to marry me, what would you say?”

Rosina did not stop for an instant’s consideration.

“I should say ‘no.’”

He received the blow full in his face.

“Why?” he asked.

“I do not want another husband. I don’t like husbands. They are all
alike.”

“How?”

“You can’t tell a thing about them beforehand; they always change, and
are different after marriage from what they were before.”

“I shall never change,” he declared positively.

“They all say that.”

“But I speak truth!”

“They all say that too.”

“But with me it will arrive;” then he added, “with me it will arrive
that I shall never change, because I shall _never_ marry.”

His remark was such a complete surprise to her that she could hardly
master her shock for a moment.

“If that was the point that you were leading up to,” she said finally,
“I’m certainly glad that I did not say ‘yes.’”

He surveyed her, smiling.

“I particularly said ‘if,’” he reminded her; “I said, ‘_if_ I asked
you to marry me,’ you know?”

Rosina felt a strong inclination to bring the evening to a close. She
wanted to be alone and think.

“We must go in,” she said.

“I also feel it,” he answered.

So they went in. The hall and staircase were quite deserted. He walked
with her to the top of the first flight.

“Do we leave good-bye here?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said smiling; “I think so.”

He stood looking at her, and out of the depths of his nature various
phantoms strove into shape.

“It is well that I go,” he said seriously; “after all, we are not
children, you and I, and however we laugh it is always that, that we
really are not children.” He put out his hand and took hers. “I shall be
away, and the time will be long, and--” he paused abruptly.

Her eyes almost closed beneath the unbearable heat of his gaze.

“Shall you remember me?” she asked, faintly this time.

“Yes, much.”

Then she opened her eyes and withdrew her hand.

“For how long?” she said as before.

He was still staring down at her.

“Who can say!”

“For three weeks? for four? for six?”

“_Je ne sais pas_,” he said briefly; “if I think too much I must come
back, and that will not be wisely.”

“We must not stand here,” she said suddenly; “adieu, au revoir!”

“Yes,” he replied sombrely, “we must part now.”

He looked at her, and his eyes locked hers hard and fast for a long
minute. She felt ill, faint, her breath seemed failing her. Then--

He seized her hand and pressed it so strongly against his lips that his
lips parted and she felt his teeth against her flesh.

“_Je vous aime!_” he whispered, almost inaudibly. “Adieu!”

PART II

THE BEATING OF THE WAVES

Chapter Ten

It was September in Munich. They stood together on the Maximilianbrücke,
and, looking down into the gray and black turbulence of the Isar, felt
themselves to be by contrast most tranquil and even-tempered. The little
river rushed beneath them, forming a wealth of tiny whirlpools above its
stone-paved way, its waters seeming to clash and struggle in a species
of mimic, liquid warfare, and then, of a sudden, victor and vanquished
fled wildly on together, giving place to other waves with their other
personal scores to settle.

The banks on either side were beginning to show some touches of autumnal
scarlet among those masses of vine whose ends trailed in the water
below, and among the shrubs of the Promenade the same blood stain
betrayed the summer’s death at the hands of the merciless frost king.
The Peace Monument was there, piercing heaven with its golden wings;
the Lucaskirche towered to the east; above them all sat the lofty
Maximilianeum, that open-work crown of Munich, whose perfectly curved
approach and double arcaded wings must joy the soul of every
artist-nature that lingers near it.

“How old are you?” the man said suddenly.

Rosina jerked her consciousness up out of the bed of the Isar.

“No gentleman at home would ask a lady that,” she told him, thus showing
great presence of mind.

He smiled and twisted his moustache.

“But I am not a gentleman at home,” he said pleasantly, “I am a
gentleman travelling.”

“How old are you?”

“I have thirty-three years.”

“Well, I haven’t,” she said with decision; “you might think that I was
forty, but that is only because I have had so much experience.”

He looked at her in a dubious, troubled way.

“I did not think that you had forty: I did not get that just perhaps.
You have not truthfully forty, have you?”

Rosina laughed in unfeigned amusement.

“No, monsieur, I am not thirty even. I told you that if I seemed to be
forty, it was because I had had so much experience.”

“So much experience?”

“Yes.”

“You feel that you have had experience?”

“I know it.”

“Experience as, _par exemple_, me?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her and smiled, shaking his head.

“Oh, madame, you say that, not at all knowing how much experience I have
had.”

She raised her eyebrows slightly and turned to walk on. He followed at
her shoulder, and when they came to the little stone stair that leads
down to the Promenade, he halted and glanced expressively off among the
paths and shade.

“There isn’t time,” she said, shaking _her_ head now.

He went down two steps alone, and then held out his hand with that
irresistible smile; she hesitated, looked helplessly around, and then,
like all women who hesitate, was forthwith lost, swallowed up, in the
maze of those wandering paths. Von Ibn secured his cane well beneath his
arm and lit a cigarette.

“Do I ever now ask you ‘may I’?” he said.

“You never did ask me ‘might you?’” she replied.

He drew two or three satisfied puffs.

“It is good to be so friends,” he commented placidly, and then he took
his cane into his right hand again and swung it with the peculiarly
vigorous swing which in his case always betrayed the possession of an
uncommon degree of _bonne humeur_. “And now for your experience?” he
asked after a little. “It is that which I will to hear.”

“Did you ever go to a masked ball?”

“_Mais, naturellement._”

“Well, so did I.” She paused to note the effect.

He threw a quick glance of undefined question at her.

“Masked?” he demanded.

“Oh, dear no! thickly veiled, and ’way upstairs in a gallery.”

“Were you greatly amused ’way upstairs in your gallery?”

“Yes, really; there were ever so many men there that I knew.”

“Did they come upstairs in the gallery?”

“No indeed, no one knew that I was there. But it interested me to see
whom _I_ knew--”

“Was I there?” he interrupted.

“Oh, it wasn’t here! it was ever so long ago, while my husband was
alive.”

“Did you see your husband?”

“Yes,” she said flushing, “and he was just like all the other men. He
wore no mask, and he did not care one bit who might recognize him.”

“You had been better not gone,” said the man decidedly.

“Yes, I think so; I lost all my love for my husband that night, and
killed all my faith in mankind forever.”

“Why did you be possessed to go?”

“I went because I did not want to be deceived in the way that many women
are deceived.”

Von Ibn laughed.

“You know now all of everything, you think?”

“I know more than most other women do.”

“You would have known much more yet if you had worn a mask,” he told her
very dryly.

She did not reply, and after a few minutes he continued:

“And now, when you know everything, and can no more be deceived, are you
so most happy?”

“I do not know,” she said slowly.

“How have you lost your faith?” he inquired; “what in especial can no
more deceive you?”

“I don’t believe in men,” she declared; “I don’t believe in anything
that they say, nor in anything that they promise. And I don’t believe
one bit in love!”

The man stopped by an empty bench.

“We have walked so long,” he remarked parenthetically; and she sat down,
parenthetically also, so to speak.

“That is sad,” he said, digging in the gravel with his cane, “not to
believe in love, or in the truth of a man! and you are a woman, too!
Then there is no more truth and love for you.”

Rosina felt disheartened. A ready acquiescence in her views is always
discouraging to a woman. What is the use of having views, if they are
just tamely agreed to at once?

“I think perhaps men really mean what they say when they say it,” she
began; “but, oh dear, they can’t stick to it afterwards. Why, my husband
told me that my lightest wish should be his law, and then what do you
think he did?”

“He did perhaps kiss you.”

“No, he went and bought a monkey!”

“What is a monkey?”

“Don’t you know what a monkey is?”

“If I know I will not trouble you to ask.”

“_C’est un singe,--affe_; now you know.”

“Oh, yes; I was thinking of a monk, and of how one told me that you had
them not with you.”

Then he scraped gravel for a long time, while her mind wandered through
a vista of monks and monkeys, and finally, entering the realm of the
present day, paused over the dream of a hat which she had seen that
morning in the Theatinerstrasse, a hat with a remarkably clever
arrangement of one buckle between two wings; it was in the store that
faced--

“I am an atheist,” said her companion, rising abruptly from his seat.

“Apropos of what?” she asked, decidedly startled, but rising
too,--“apropos of the monkey?”

“_Comment?_” he said blankly.

“Nothing, nothing!” quickly.

They walked on slowly among the shadows which were beginning to gather
beneath the trees; after a while he spoke again.

“I tell you just now that I am an atheist, and that is very true. Now I
will make you a proposal and you shall see how serious I mean. I will
change myself and believe in God, if you will change yourself and
believe once more in men.”

“Can you believe in God or not just as you please?” she asked
wonderingly.

“I am the master of myself,” he replied straitly; “if I say that I will
pray to-night, I will pray. And you must say that you will believe,” he
insisted; “you must again have a faith in men, and in their truth, and
in honor.” Then he paused lengthily. “And in love?” he continued; “say
that you will again believe in love?--you will, will you not? yes?”

“I don’t know that I can do it, even if I want to,” she said musingly;
“looking on at life is so terribly disheartening, especially with us in
America, you know.”

“Oh,” he said quickly, “but I do not want you to believe in love in
America; I talk of here in Munich.”

“I suppose you mean yourself?”

“Yes,” he said most emphatically,--“me.”

She could not help laughing a little.

“You do really amuse me so much,” she apologized.

A workman in a dirty blouse and a forlorn, green Tyrolese hat, the
cock’s plume of which had been all too often rained upon, passed close
beside them. Von Ibn, nothing daunted, seized her gloved hand and
pressed it to his lips; she freed it quickly and swept all their
environage with one swift and comprehensive glance.

“If any one that knew us should see you!” she exclaimed.

He calmly gazed after the now distant workman.

“I did not know him,” he said; “did you?”

Then she was obliged to laugh again.

“You are always so afraid of the world,” he continued, remonstrating;
“what does it make if one do see me kiss your hand? kissing your hand is
so little kissing.”

He paused a moment and smiled whimsically.

“I did really laugh alone in my room the other night. I sit there
smoking and thinking what a bad fright you have always when I will to
take your hand and kiss it--you fear ever that some one shall not be
there to see. Then I think, if I would give you a true kiss, that would
be to your mind so awful,--the fear of a seeing, you know,--that we must
then go in a cellar and bolt nine doors first, probably.”

He laughed, but she did not.

“When I go into a cellar with you,” she said coldly, “and allow nine
doors bolted, you may kiss me, and I pledge you my word not to scream.”

A dead silence followed her remark, and lasted until Von Ibn broke it,
saying abstractedly:

“One does go underground to visit the breweries;” after which he
meditated some while longer before adding, “but they never would bolt
the doors, I think.”

Rosina felt any comment on these words to be unnecessary and continued
upon the even tenor of her way. They were close by the Luitpoldbrücke
now, and she went towards the bridge, which lay upon their homeward
route. Von Ibn followed her lead placidly until they were upon the
opposite bank, when he suddenly halted.

“Have you lost something?” she asked, stopping also.

“No, but I asked you some question just now and you have never reply.”

“What was it?”

“About believing.”

“But I am going so soon,” she objected.

“How soon?”

“In December.”

“It is then all settled?” he inquired, with interest.

“Yes.”

“But you can unsettle it?” he reminded her eagerly.

“I don’t want to unsettle it--I want to go.”

He stared at her blankly.

“How have I offended you?” he asked after a while.

“You have not offended me,” she said, much surprised.

“But you say that you want to go?”

“That is because I feel that I must go.”

“Why must you go? why do you not stay here this winter?--or, hold! why
do you not go to Dresden? Later I also must go to Dresden, and it would
be so _gemüthlich_, in Dresden together.”

“It will be _gemüthlich_ for me to get home, too.”

“Do you wish much to go?”

“Yes; I think that I do.”

Then she wondered if she was really speaking the truth, and, going to
the edge of the bank, looked abstractedly down into the rapid current.

“What do you think?” he asked, following her there.

She turned her face towards him with a smile.

“I cannot help feeling curious as to whether, when I shall really be
again in America, I shall know a longing for--for the Isar, or not?”

“I wonder, shall I ever be in America,” he said thoughtfully; “and if I
ever should come there, where do you think would be for me the most
interesting?”

“_Chez moi_,” she laughed.

He smiled in amusement at her quick answer.

“But I shall never come to America,” he went on presently; “I do not
think it is a healthy country. I have an uncle who did die of the yellow
fever in Chili.”

“There is more of America than Chili; that’s in South America--quite
another country from mine.”

“Yes, I know; your land is where the men had the war with the negroes
before they make them all free. I study all that once and find it quite
dull.”

“The war was between the Northern and Southern States of North
America--” she began.

“_Ça ne m’intéresse du tout_,” he broke in; “let us walk on.”

They walked on, and there was a lengthy pause in the conversation,
because Rosina considered his interruption to be extremely rude and
would not broach another subject. They went a long way in the darkness
of a heavily clouded September twilight, and finally:

“Where did he buy it?” he asked.

“Where did he buy what? where did who buy what?”

“The monkey.”

“Oh! I don’t know, I’m sure.”

Then there was another long silence.

“To-morrow,” he announced, “I am going to the Tagernsee, and--”

“I’m not,” she put in flatly.

He turned his head and stared reprovingly.

“How you have say that! not in the way of good manners at all.”

“No,” she said, with an air of retort, “I am with you so much that I am
beginning to forget all my good manners.”

“Am I so bad mannered?”

“Yes, you are.”

“How?”

“You interrupt, and you are frank to a degree that is always impolite,
and sometimes really awful.”

“And you,” he exclaimed eagerly, “how bad you also are! you never even
try to be agreeable, and when I speak with great seriosity you are often
more amused than before, even.”

Rosina tried to look sorry, but found it safer, even in the twilight, to
look the other way.

“The truth is,” he went on vigorously, “I am very much too good with
you! I have never taken my time to an American before, and I am always
fearful. I have been a fool. I shall not be a fool any more.”

“How do you intend to begin to grow wise?”

“You will see.”

The threat sounded dire, but they were now at the corner by the
Maximiliansstrasse, and supper was too near for her to feel downcast.

“I hope that we are to have potato salad to-night,” she said cheerfully.

He continued to meditate moodily.

“Oh, we are much too much together,” he announced at last.

“Well,” she replied, “if you go to the Tagernsee to-morrow that will
give us a little mutual rest.”

“I may miss the train,” he added thoughtfully; “if I do--”

“You can take the next one,” she finished for him.

He looked at her witheringly.

“If I do miss the train, I will carry my violin to you and we will make
some music in the evening.”

Rosina stopped, fairly paralyzed with joy.

“Oh, monsieur,” she cried, “will you really?”

“Yes, that is what I will; _if_ I miss the train.”

They had entered beneath the long arcade, which was dark and altogether
deserted except for one distant figure.

“I almost want you to miss your train,” she said eagerly. “You do not
know how very, very anxious I am to hear you play.”

“I can miss it,” he said thoughtfully; “it is very simple to miss a
train. One can sleep, and then here in Munich one may say the cabman a
wrong Gare. If I say ‘Ostbahnhof’ when I must go from the Starnberg, I
shall surely miss the train, you know.”

He looked at her gravely and she burst out laughing at the picture he
had drawn for her mind, because there is all of three or four miles
between those two particular stations.

“But I don’t want you to miss the train,” she said presently. “You can
play for me after you come back, I--”

At this moment the figure which had been coming towards them suddenly
resolved itself into that of a stalwart young man, who, just as he was
directly in front of them, stopped, seized Rosina in his arms and kissed
her. She very naturally screamed in fright, and her escort delivered a
blow at the stranger which sent him reeling backwards against one of the
stone pillars.

The man, who was well dressed and appeared to be a gentleman, recovered
himself with surprising quickness, and laughed oddly, saying:

“My Lord, what a welcome!”

At the sound of his voice Rosina screamed afresh, this time in quite
another tone, however, exclaiming:

“It’s my cousin Jack!”

“It is your--some one you know?” stammered Von Ibn. “Then I must demand
a thousand pardons.”

“Not at all,” said Jack, taking his hand and shaking it heartily;
“that’s all right! don’t say a word more. The trouble was that when I
saw Rosina I forgot that she had gotten out of the habit of being
kissed. Of course I scared her awfully. Are you over it yet, dear?”

Rosina stood between the two men, and appeared completely stunned by her
cousin’s arrival.

“Where did you drop from, anyhow?” she asked, finding her tongue at
last.

“Came over to go back with you; left Paris last night.”

“Where will you stay? There isn’t an empty corner in the _pension_, one
has to write ever so long ahead.”

“I’m going to stay at the Vierjahreszeiten, just beside you. I’m all
right.”

“Yes,” said Von Ibn suddenly, “you are very right; I stay there too.”

Rosina thought despairingly, “They’ll see a lot of one another, and Jack
will dislike him and he’ll hate Jack.”

By this time they were come to her door and paused there.

“I’m going in with you,” the cousin said. “Madame was so glad to see me
again that she wanted me to come back and sit next to her at supper. I
was awfully glad to see her. She’s even younger and prettier than when I
last saw her--when you and I were kids there that winter, don’t you
remember?”

Von Ibn was staring sombrely at Rosina and she was sure that Jack would
notice it, and wished that he wouldn’t. Then he gave a little start and
held out his hand.

“I shall not come to-night,” he said, “and to-morrow I go to the
Tagernsee; so it is ‘good-bye’ here.”

She felt choked.

“Good-bye,” she said, keenly aware of being watched, but striving to
speak pleasantly notwithstanding. He shook her hand, raised his hat, and
left them.

Then her cousin swung the big _porte_ open and they entered the passage
and went towards the stairs. At the first step he paused and said in a
peculiarly pointed tone of voice:

“Well, are you going to marry him?”

She jumped at the suddenness of the question, and then, recovering
herself quickly, answered coldly:

“Of course not.”

“Why of course not?”

Her neck took on a quite new poise--not new to the man behind her,
however.

“I asked you, ‘Why of course not’?” he repeated.

“You know how foolish such a question is.”

“It isn’t foolish. Yourself considered, it’s the most natural question
in the world.”

“You never met me before when I was walking with a stranger, and then
asked me such a thing.”

“This man’s different. Some one wrote home that you were going to marry
him. You can imagine Uncle John! I was sent for from the beach and
shipped by the first thing that sailed after my arrival.”

Rosina stopped on the first landing to stare in tranceful astonishment.

“Some one wrote!” she ejaculated faintly. “Who wrote?”

“Never you mind who wrote. Whoever it was set uncle thinking, and I was
posted off to look him up.”

“When did you come over?”

“Landed in Hamburg the last of August.”

“Where have you been ever since?”

“Been looking him up.”

Rosina began to mount the second staircase; she appeared completely
bewildered.

“It’s very nice of uncle,” she said about the fourth step, “and of
course I’m awfully obliged to whoever wrote home; but I’m not going to
marry him, really.”

Jack whistled.

“Well,” he said cheerily, as they attained the second landing, “I know
all about him now, anyway; and if you ever do want to go ahead, you can
be sure that he’s all right.”

“I knew that he was all right,” she said quietly; “every one in Europe
knows that he’s all right.”

“He’s a first-class boxer, anyhow,” the cousin declared. “Lord, what a
blow that was! And I did not mean to frighten you at all, either; I
thought that you saw me coming.”

“How was I to know that it was you? I supposed that you were in New
York. I did not think that there was a man on this continent who had a
right to kiss me. And even if there was I shouldn’t be expecting him to
do so in public. You never kissed me in the street yourself before. What
possessed you to do so this time?”

She faced about on the stairs as she spoke, and he stopped and drew a
deep breath or two. It takes time to become acclimated to the stairs
abroad.

“Don’t be vexed at me,” he implored, “or I shall think that you are not
glad that I came; and you are, aren’t you?”

“Yes, of course I am.”

“And after supper to-night we’ll go out and take a good old-fashioned
tramp and talk a lot, won’t we?”

They were now before the door of the _pension_ and he was pressing the
electric bell. She sighed a resigned sigh of utter submission, nodded
acquiescently, and waited beside him.

Anna, a maid whose countenance left much to be divined at pleasure,
finally let them in. When she saw that the lady had changed her escort,
her face fell and she slightly shook her head as if regretful that one
who was so generous should own openly to the vice of fickleness. They
went into the long hall and Jack paused to hang his hat upon one of the
hooks in that angle by the door; then he overtook his cousin and they
went together to the salon, the pretty little salon with its great
window, tall white-tiled stove, piano, corner-ways divan, tabouret,
table of magazines, quaint Dutch picture of Queen Wilhelmina, and the
vase in the corner--that green vase from whose stem hangs the
flower-like body of a delicate porcelain nymph.

“You can’t smoke here, you know,” she cautioned him. “If you want to
smoke you must go into the corridor.”

“I don’t want to smoke,” he said. “I’ll look out of the window. I like
to watch the people.”

So she left him there and sought Ottillie.

After supper that night they did go to walk; and if Rosina’s cousin
came abroad with a mission he certainly went in for fulfilling it
vigorously.

“Who wrote you about him, anyhow?” she demanded at last, when
her patience was nearly exhausted by the mercilessness of his
cross-examination. She was inwardly furious at whoever had done so,
but it seemed wisdom to conceal her fury--for the present at least.

“You can’t travel about all summer with the same man everlastingly at
your heels, without other people’s seeing him as well as yourself.”

“But some one person must have written. It can’t be that several people
would bother to.”

“You won’t ever know who wrote, so don’t you fret.”

They were crossing the Max-Joseph Platz diagonally, and a light flashing
from a passing trolley seemed to suddenly illuminate her brain.

“I bet I do know,” she cried.

“I bet you don’t.”

“It was a man; now wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was a man; but I won’t say a word more.”

She smiled, triumphant in her woman’s intuition.

“It was that man at Zurich,” she exclaimed; “wasn’t it?”

He turned into the Residenzstrasse and made no reply.

“It was, wasn’t it?” she insisted.

“I shan’t tell.”

“You needn’t tell. I know that it was and you know that it was too, so
I’m satisfied.”

They went along past the two sentinels who guard the gate of the royal
palace, and emerged on the large open space that spreads before the
Feldherrnhalle. From there the Ludwigsstrasse stretches straight out and
away to the Siegesthor, stretches in one magnificent splendor of breadth
and boulevard and electric lights. They took the right-hand side and set
off at a pace neither swift nor slow--just such a pace as will allow
sufficient breath for ample conversation.

“You know you’ll marry again, Rosina, no matter what you may say; you
know that, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Nonsense!”

“Well, I’m sure that I won’t for a long time.”

“Of course you can’t until the two years are out, but they’re out this
October; and you know the more dead-set you are against doing anything
the surer you are to do it. We all know that just by the light of the
past.”

She elevated her eyebrows and made no reply.

“You’ve got so much money that naturally we couldn’t hear that any one
was following you continually, without wanting to know what he was
after. I should think you could see how that would strike Uncle John.”

“Monsieur von Ibn doesn’t mean to marry any more than I do,” she
declared positively.

“Doesn’t he? How do you know?”

“He told me so himself.”

“When?”

“Ever so many times.”

He laughed and stopped to examine one of the posters of the
“Elfscharfrichters,”--the one of the cadaverous lady all in black, with
her hands outspread.

“What interests you in him, anyhow?” he asked after a little.

“Can’t a woman enjoy being with a man without wanting to marry him? I
like him because he’s so original.”

“He’s original all right,” Jack reflected; “that’s very, very true. He’s
the first man who ever thought of knocking me down for kissing you.”

“It was because I screamed. Why didn’t you write that you were coming?”

“I wanted to arrive unexpectedly and see for myself.”

“Well, did you see?”

He chuckled.

“Yes, and felt too. He doesn’t intend that any one else shall kiss you.”

Rosina whirled, her eyes sparkling with anger.

“I’ll never forgive you if you say another thing like that,” she cried
hotly.

The cousin judged it advisable to suggest diverging from the
Ludwigsstrasse, and extending their promenade in the direction of the
Wittelsbach Palace. Dark streets have a naturally subduing effect, and
he knew what an upheaval his arrival had produced even better than she
did.

They went towards the Caserne, and were in the Améliesstrasse before
either began another subject. And even then it was really not a new one,
because Jack, having a definite end in view, could not lose sight of it
for a minute.

“Why do you think that you don’t want to get married again?” he said,
courageously returning to the fight.

“I don’t think anything about it. I know that I don’t want to get
married again!”

“Von Ibn seems to be a mighty nice sort of a fellow. I’ve met ever so
many people who told me lots about him. He’s got quite a property for
these men over here, and he’ll have two jolly places and a title, too.
And the family won’t kick over his marrying any one; they’ve been at him
to get married for years and years. He’s the only son, you know.”

“All right,” she said dryly.

“Have you anything personal against him?”

“No; but I know that I can see all that I want of him without marrying
him; and as long as we do not get married we have the delightful
privilege of being able to separate the instant that we grow tired of
one another. And the ability to stop when you’ve had enough is a great
thing.”

“Has he bored you any yet?”

“Not yet. Oh, Jack, you ought to hear him talk. He said yesterday that
we must go somewhere early before the cool grew too hot.”

Jack regarded her sympathetically.

“I’d certainly marry him,” he said, with decision. “If he can say things
like that offhand, only think what he’d be to live with day after day.”

Rosina was silent for a moment, and then she gave a violent shiver.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, in a voice that echoed like a low cry, “I don’t
believe that I ever _can_ marry again--it’s so _terrible_!”

Jack took her hand and drew it closely within his arm.

“Don’t say that,” he said earnestly. “Every one knows that you didn’t
have a fair show first time. Your husband was--Well, you know what he
was.”

“I should say that I did know what he was.”

“I always wondered if you just wanted to get your hands on a big
establishment.”

“Oh, what makes you say such things? You know that I was desperately in
love with him--as much so as a girl can be.”

“Do you feel anything like it again now?”

She shook her head.

“No, indeed; I feel that I may get tired of monsieur any day.”

They turned down towards the Ludwigsstrasse and Rosina appeared to be
thinking deeply. At last she spoke, and her accents were firm as
granite.

“I do not believe that I ever _could_ marry again.”

Jack shrugged his shoulders.

“There’s no string on you,” he declared lightly.

The next morning, as the lady was stirring her whipped cream into her
chocolate, Ottillie entered with a note:

    “DEAR ROSINA,--Von Ibn and I are leaving for the Tagernsee by
    the early train. Think we’ll be gone four or five days.

    “Always yours,
        “JACK.”

Chapter Eleven

It was three o’clock on the last day of September, and the last day of
September had been a very rainy one. Little draggled sparrows quarrelled
on the black asphalt of the Maximiliansstrasse because it was wet and
they came in for their share of the consequent ill-humor; all the cabs
and cabmen and cab-horses were waterproofed to the fullest possible
extent; all the cocks’ plumes in the forlorn green hats of the forlorn
street-sweeping women hung dolefully and dejectedly down their backs.
People coming to the Schauspielhaus lowered their umbrellas at the
entrance and scooted in out of the drizzle; people coming out of the
Schauspielhaus raised their umbrellas and slopped away through the
universal damp and spatters.

All of which but served to deepen the already deep melancholy and
_ennui_ of Rosina, who leaned in her window across the way, staring upon
the outer world with an infinite sense of its pitiful inadequacy to meet
her present wishes, and a most profound regret that her cousin had ever
crossed the ocean on her account.

For they had not returned from the Tagernsee. On the contrary the
expedition had stretched to other “sees,” to the Herrn-Chiemsee, to
Salzburg, and now she held in her hand a hastily pencilled scrawl,
brought by the two o’clock post, which said:

    “Ho for Vienna. Always did want to see Buda-Pesth.      J.”

And nothing more!

“It’s so like a man,” she told herself without troubling to think just
what she did mean by the words. “Oh, dear! oh, _dear_!” and she turned
from the window and flung herself despairingly into one of the big red
velvet chairs, preparing to read or to cry as the fancy might seize her.

There came a light tap at the door and then it opened a very little.

“Oh, pardon me,” cried a sweet, sweet voice, “I think you are perhaps
gone out!”

Then the door opened and the speaker showed herself. It was the daughter
of the house, an ideally blonde and bonny German girl. She came across
the room and her face shaded slightly as she asked:

“You have no bad news? no?”

“No,” said Rosina, forcing a smile; “I’m only very cross.”

“Cross? Why cross? You are but laughing at me. You are not really
cross.”

Rosina was silent; her lip quivered slightly.

“Oh,” said Fraülein quickly. “I am come that I may ask you a favor! The
parlor has a workman to make the window again; it is not good closed,
and the French lady wishes to call on you. May she come here?”

“Yes,” Rosina said, “I shall be so very glad to have her come here, and
Ottillie can bring us some tea after a while.”

She dried her eyes openly in preparation for the visit to be.

“You are lonely to-day,” said Fraülein sympathetically. “I am glad that
your cousin did come.”

“Yes,” said Rosina, “but he went away so soon again.”

Her eyes immediately refilled.

“You love each other so very much in America,” said the German girl
gently; she stood still for a minute and then smiled suddenly. “I will
tell madame to come here,” she added, and left the room.

Rosina went back to the window and her unseeing contemplation of the
outdoors. Presently some one knocked and she turned, crying:

“_Entrez!_”

The door opened, and instead of the French lady whose husband was
fleeing the revolution in Caraccas by bringing his family to Munich for
the winter, a man entered.

The man was tall and dark, with brown eyes and a black moustache, and
his eyes were oddly full of light and laughter.

She stood still staring for one short minute, and then suddenly
something swallowed up all the space between them, and her hand was fast
between his grasp, pressed hard against his lips, while the pleasure in
her eyes rose and fell against the joy of his own.

“_Vous me voyez revenu!_” he said.

“Where is Jack?” she asked; both spoke almost at once, and Von Ibn was
conscious of sharing a divine sense of relief with her as he replied:

“He is gone alone to Vienna!”

It was as if a heavy cloud had been lifted from her horizon. She sank
down in one of the big easy-chairs and he dragged another close, very
close to her side.

“Not so near!” she exclaimed, a little frightened.

He withdrew the chair two inches and fixed his eyes hungrily upon her
face.

“Has it been long to you?” he asked, his tone one of breathless
feeling.

And then she realized to the full how very long it had been, and
confessed the fact in one great in-drawn sigh.

“Why did you go so far?” she demanded.

“It was one step beyond the another; I have no idea but of the Tagernsee
when we leave.”

“You’ve been gone weeks!”

He leaned forward and seized her hand again.

“Was it so long?” he questioned softly.

“You know that I only saw my cousin just that one evening!” she had the
face to say complainingly.

“Yes,” he said sympathetically; “he is so nice, your cousin. I have
learned to like him so very much; we have really great pleasure
together. But,” he added, “I did not come back to talk of him.”

“Why did you come back?” she asked, freeing herself and pushing her
chair away.

He smiled upon her.

“You ask?” he said, in amusement; “shall I say that it was to see you?”

“I hope that you did not return on my account.”

He paused, twisting his moustache; then started a little and said:

“No, I am returned wholly for business.”

Rosina received the cold douche with a composure bred of experience, and
after a liberal interval he went on.

“But I wanted also to see you too.”

“Well, you are seeing me, are you not?”

“Yes, but you do not smile as before your cousin is come. I want you to
smile. Oh,” he exclaimed, suddenly interrupting himself, “have you ride
horseback since I left?”

“Oh, yes, almost every day.”

His face clouded slightly.

“Who have you ride with?”

“With my friends who are here, and twice with the lieutenant.”

Then his face clouded very heavily.

“Is he interesting?” he asked; “yes?”

“It was the Englischergarten that was wonderful,” she told him. “We rode
very early in the morning and the dew was on the grass and we could hear
the pheasants in the underbrush when the noise of the horses’ feet
frightened them further away.”

“And the lieutenant?” he asked.

“And oh,” she continued, “you know that place where the woods open so
widely, and you can see so far across,--_eh bien_, we saw one morning
the deer standing in the edge of the forest just there, one would have
said fifty miles from civilization, not at all as if they were in the
midst of Munich.”

“And the lieutenant?” he repeated.

“And then another day the clouds of morning mist were so thick that we
could see their outlines as they lay upon the earth, and ride into them
and ride out of them,--a quite new experience for me.”

“But the lieutenant?” he exclaimed impatiently, “the lieutenant? what
did he talk of? what did you speak together of?”

Rosina laughed, nodding merrily over his impatience.

“We talked of the pheasants,” she said, “of the deer, of the fog. Are
you satisfied?”

He shrugged his shoulders, his frown lifted.

“It is quite one to me,” he said indifferently; “you know that I have
said before that I am not of a _tempérament jaloux_.”

Then he got up and walked about the room, taking a cigar from his pocket
and holding it unlighted in his mouth.

“May I smoke here?” he asked.

“I don’t care if you do.”

He returned suddenly to his chair, laid the cigar on the table, and took
her hand again.

“Your cousin is so nice,” he told her, as if the recollection of Jack’s
charms had necessitated his at once expressing his feelings towards
Jack’s cousin.

“When is he coming back?” she asked.

“In one week.”

“When does he sail? Do you know?”

“On the nineteenth day, from Genoa.”

She quite sprang from her seat.

“Not really!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, so he tell me.”

He drew her back into her chair and she forgot the hand which he still
held in her desperate feeling of the instant. She was helplessly choked
with conflicting emotions. October instead of December! That came of
having a cousin!

The kingdom of the other chair advanced its border-line more than two
inches, and she did not appear to notice the bold encroachment.

“What does it matter?” she asked herself bitterly; “in a few days I’m
going, and then I shall never lay eyes on him again,” and the tears
welled up thickly at the thought.

“_Qu’est-ce que vous avez?_” he said anxiously; “you must not cry when I
am returned, you know!”

At that she sobbed outright.

He looked at her with an intentness very foreign to his usual
expression, and seemed to weigh two courses of action and deliberate as
to their relative advisability; he ended by laying her hand down gently
and going to the window, where he remained for several minutes, looking
out and saying nothing.

She dried her eyes quickly and quietly (only a foolish woman continues
to weep after the man has gone), and waited for him to turn. Finally he
did so.

“It is not raining once more,” he said; “let us go out and walk far.
That will do you quite well; I cannot bear that you weep.”

He added the last words in a lower tone, and coming close behind her
chair suddenly stooped.

She realized all in a flash where he was, what he was meditating, the
half-open door, and writhed quickly out of the chair and away.

“Why not?” he asked, looking after her unsmilingly. “It will do you no
hurt and me much good.”

“I’m out of the habit,” she said shortly, recollecting Jack’s words on
that famous night of his arrival.

They were both on their feet, she by the window and he by the chair
which she had just left.

“Was your husband very _tendre_?” he asked.

She felt the corners of her mouth give way under the stressful shock of
this question. “I might say, ‘I never tried him to see,’” she thought,
“but he _never_ would understand,” and so there was an instant of
silence.

“Why do you smile?” he demanded, smiling himself.

“Because we don’t call men ‘tender.’ We call meat ‘tender’ and men
‘affectionate.’”

“But I _am_ tender,” he affirmed.

“Are you? Well, you are younger than my husband and perhaps that
accounts for it.”

He reflected, but did not appear to understand; finally he gave it up
for a bad job and said, changing to a less abstruse subject:

“We go to walk? yes?”

“Certainly; if you will wait while I have some proper boots found for
me.”

“Yes, I will wait.”

He came towards her.

“Oh, you had better go into the corridor and wait,” she exclaimed
hastily. “I’ll come in a moment.”

He stopped short and smiled his irresistible smile.

“You are so madly queer. _Qu’est-ce que vous avez_? You scream always,
and yet I have not done nothing.”

Then without another word he left the room.

When she was alone Rosina rang for her maid. As Ottillie knelt at her
feet, she frowned deeply, thinking how more than horrid it was that Jack
should have come, that she should be obliged to go, and that women may
not allow themselves to be kissed. Later she recollected that Jack was
in Vienna, that there was the half of October yet to be lived, and that
all disembodied kisses must of necessity have an incarnation yet to
come. And then she smiled once more.

Ottillie brought her wraps and adjusted her hat.

“Will madame take supper here?” she asked.

“_Je le pense, oui._”

The maid muffled a sigh; she would have made Von Ibn a conquering hero
indeed, if her heartfelt wishes could have given him the victory. And
apropos of this subject, it would be interesting, very interesting, to
know how many international marriages have been backed up by a French
_femme-de-chambre_ burning with impatience to return to her own
continent.

Rosina went to the salon and found her hero looking at a “Jugend” with a
bored expression. When he saw her he sprang to his feet and sought his
hat and umbrella forthwith.

Then they went down the three flights of stairs to the street, and found
it wet indeed.

“We cannot go on the Promenade,” he said, after casting a comprehensive
glance about and afar. “I think we will go by the Hofgarten and walk
under the arcade there; there will it be dry, _n’est-ce pas_?”

“Yes, surely it will be dry there,” she acquiesced. “It is always dry
under cover in Europe, because your rain is so quiet and well behaved;
it never comes with a terrible gale, whirling and twisting, and
drenching everything inside and outside, like our storms.”

“Why do your storms be so?”

“We haven’t found any way of teaching them better manners yet. They are
like our flies; our flies are the noisiest, most intrusive, most
impertinent creatures. You don’t appreciate your timid, modest little
flies.”

“I do not like flies.”

“Yes,” she laughed, “that is the whole story. You ‘do not like flies,’
while we go crazy if there is one around, and have our houses screened
from cellar to garret.”

“I do not find this subject very amusing,” he said; “let us speak of
another thing.”

Rosina glanced up at the prison-like façade which they were passing.

“I find the architecture of the Hoftheater terribly monotonous,” she
said warmly. “Why do you not have a more diversified style of windows
where so many must be in a straight row?”

“Munich is not my city,” he responded, shrugging his shoulder; “and if
you will to find fault with the way those windows go, you must wait to
meet the shade of Klenze in the after-world. He made it all in 1823.”

“When I get among the Bavarian shades,” she said thoughtfully, “I want
to meet King Louis more than any one else. I think that he is the most
interesting figure in all the history of the country.”

“Perhaps he will be there as here, and not care to meet any one.”

“Oh, no,” she said hopefully; “he was crazy here, but he will be sane
there and--”

“_Mon Dieu_, madame, have a care!” he cried in a low tone, glancing
apprehensively about.

“What is it?” she asked, alarmed.

He lowered his voice to an almost inaudible pitch.

“It is that we do not discuss our kings in public as you are habited to
do. _Voyons donc_,” he continued, “if I said, ‘_Oh, je trouve
l’Empereur très-bête!_’ (as I well might say, for I find him often bête
enough); if I say that, I might find a _sergeant-de-ville_ at my elbow,
and myself in prison almost as the words were still in the air.”

Rosina looked thoroughly frightened.

“And what would they do to you?” she asked, looking up at him with an
expression which brought a strange answering look into his own eyes.

“That would depend on how _bête_ I had found the emperor,” he declared,
laughing; “but, madame, do not be so troubled, because no one has heard
this time.”

They were walking at a good pace, the puddles considered, and came now
to the arched entrance into the Hofgarten, where a turning brought them
beneath the arcades. The south side was crowded, thanks to the
guide-book recommendation to examine the frescoes there on a day when it
is too wet to “do” other sights about the city; but the west side, where
the frescoes are of landscapes only, and sadly defaced at that, was
quite deserted, and they made their way through the crowd to the
grateful peace of the silence beyond. It was a pleasant place to walk,
with the Hofgarten showing its fresh green picture between the frames of
the arcaded arches. The façade of the Hof formed the background to
all--a background of stone and marble, of serried ranks of windows
marshalled to order by lofty portals and balconies.

“Why are women always like that?” he asked, when they had paced in
silence to the other end and turned to return.

“Like what?”

He threw a quick glance of exasperation at her.

“When I say a question, it is always with another question that you
reply!”

“Well,” she said, “we were talking of the emperor, and now you say ‘why
are women always like that?’ and I ask ‘like what?’”

He looked more exasperated than before.

“I have all finished with the emperor,” he said, as if outraged by her
want of comprehension as to his meaning. “Is it likely that I will wish
to talk of the emperor when on the nineteenth you sail from Genoa?”

She felt her eyes moistening afresh at this recurrence to her departure,
and made no answer. He slashed along vigorously for two or three yards,
cutting a wide swathe with his umbrella, and then his grievance appeared
somewhat appeased, and he explained in a milder tone:

“I ask you why are women like that,--like that, that they never will
like to be kissed?”

Rosina halted in astonishment.

“What is it now?” he asked, turning because he missed her. “Have I not
yet made myself plain?”

“The idea--after all this while--of your going back to that subject!”

“I have not go back to it,” he said coolly; “I have thought of no other
thing while you were booting yourself or now. Why do women say ‘No’?
Why do you say ‘No’?”

“Let me see,” she said thoughtfully. “I think it is like this: if I
allowed you to, you would naturally feel that hereafter you could,
whereas I very much prefer that you should know that you can’t.”

He looked in a despair so complete as to be almost ludicrous.

“Oh, say slower,” he pleaded, earnestly. “It is so very important to
well understand.”

She laughed at his serious face. For the moment Jack and Genoa were both
forgotten, and nothing but the pleasure of good company and an
atmosphere breathing the perfume that follows rain where there are
flowers, were left to joy her.

“It isn’t worth repeating slower,” she said, with a smile. “It was a
positive negative which even if developed in a dark room would make a
proof that I did not want to be kissed.”

They went the entire length of the arcade while he endeavored to work
out the solution of her second riddle, and then he shrugged his
shoulders, remarking:

“I have never interest myself in a kodak any,” and appeared to regard
the subject as finished.

They came back up the arcade, and, the sidewalks being now fairly dry,
went out under the stairway at the corner, into the Galleriestrasse.

“Do you like this country?” he asked presently.

“Bavaria? Immensely.”

“I mean, do you like the Continent--Europe?”

“Yes.”

“What do think about it?”

“I think Europa showed great good taste in getting down from the bull
just where she did.”

“Then you like this land?”

“I love it! It hurts me whenever I hear my countrymen malign it.”

They were in the Ludwigsstrasse, and the scene was like a holiday in
America. Every one was out after the rain and all faces reflected that
exuberant gayety which seems to be born about five o’clock in each
continental city. People in carriages, people in cabs, people on
horseback, people on bicycles, people walking, people leading dogs,
people wheeling babies, people following children, all one laughing,
bowing, chattering procession, coming and going ceaselessly between the
Feldherrnhalle and the Siegesthor, with the blue Bavarian sky blessing
all the pleasure, and the tame doves of Munich under the feet of each
and every one.

Von Ibn stopped to watch the brilliant scene; Rosina stood beside him.

“What ill can one say of us?” he asked, after a while. “How can a place
be better than this?”

“_I_ never said that any place could be better than this,” she
asseverated; “but I am uncommon in my opinions. The average American is
born in a land overflowing with steam-heat, ice-water, and bath-tubs,
and he suffers when he has to lose the hyphens and use the nouns
separately.”

Von Ibn frowned.

“You amuse yourself much with queer words to-day,” he said
discontentedly. “I wish I have stayed with Jack. I was much pleasured
with him.”

“But you said that you had to return because of some business,” she
reminded him.

He raised his eyebrows, and they went on again. After a little she
turned her eyes up to his and smiled.

“Don’t say that you wish you were with Jack. I am so glad that you are
here.”

He returned the smile.

“I have no wish to be with your cousin,” he said amicably; “I find you
much more agreeable.”

Then a little dog that a lady was leading by a long chain ran three
times around his legs and half choked itself to death, and the lady
screamed, and it was several minutes before all was calm again.

“I find it _bête_ to have a dog like that,” he said, looking disgustedly
over his shoulder at the heroine of the episode, as she placidly
continued on her way. “It was _grand merci_ that I am not fallen, then.
What was about my feet I could not fancy, and also,”--he began to
laugh,--“and also it was droll, for I might not kick the dog.”

Rosina laughed too.

“But in America,” he went on, suddenly recurring to their earlier topic,
“have you no art?”

“Oh, yes; but nothing to compare with our sanitary arrangements. Our
president’s bath-tub is cut out of one solid block of marble,” she added
proudly.

“That is not so wonderful.”

“Isn’t it? The head-lines in the papers led me to think that it was. But
I’ll tell you what I think is a disgrace to America,” she went on with
energy, “and that is that the American artists who come to study abroad
must pay duty on their own pictures when they take them back.”

“Is that really so?” he asked.

“Yes, that is really so. And it is very unjust, for the musician and
surgeon and scientist can bring all the results of their study in duty
free.”

“They have them within their heads.”

“Yes; but they have them just the same.”

“Everything costs a great deal with you, _n’est-ce pas_?”

“I should say it did. No one ought to blame us for telling what things
cost, because everything costs so much. A carriage is six to ten _marks_
an hour.”

“_C’est assez cher!_” he said, laughing.

“_C’est un peu trop!_” she rejoined warmly. “But the well-to-do
certainly do revel in griddle-cakes and hot-water faucets, and when I
meet an American man in Europe I am forced to believe that they are the
only really worthy ambitions to be striven for.”

“I could not live there, I think,” he exclaimed.

“I’m afraid not,” said she sadly. “You don’t play golf or drink, and men
of leisure have almost no other careers open to them with us.”

“I have my music.”

“But you could never enjoy that there,” she cried, shivering
involuntarily. “Every one talks during music, and some cough, and
gentlemen clear their throats--”

“And does no one hiss them?” he interrupted, wide-eyed.

“Hiss them? Never! The idea!”

He stopped and lit a cigarette.

“But one can travel?” he suggested.

“Yes, surely there is plenty of room for that,” she said dryly; “but you
don’t see many ruined castles or historic battlefields _en route_. And
the dust, _oh, la, la_! And the steam coils under your seat--and the
air--and the ventilation--and the nights--and the days.”

“You would better stay here,” he remarked.

“Oh, _I_ think so,” she responded frankly; “it’s so jolly getting your
gloves cleaned for two cents a pair; but if we don’t change the subject
I shall cry.”

He looked at her quickly.

“That is the University there,” he told her, pointing to their left;
“shall we go there?”

“What for?”

“To look upon it.”

“Why, I’ve seen it dozens of times.”

He took his cigarette out of his mouth, examined it carefully, and
replaced it between his lips.

“But one washes here,” he said presently.

“One--washes--” she stammered blankly; and then it flashed across her
that it was the bath-tub that was rankling in his soul, and she gasped,
adjusted herself, and answered:

“Of course one washes here. But in America it is all made so
convenient, and is regarded as less of an event.”

“It is no event to me to wash,” he said indignantly; “I find no
excitement in washing.”

“I never said you did; I was comparing quite another class of society
with their equals in the other country.”

“But to shave,” he went on, “that I find terrible.”

“It’s no worse than having a _coiffure_ to make.”

“But I have no _coiffure_ to make.”

“No; but I have.”

He threw his cigarette into the street.

“It is not so bad as shaving.”

“It takes longer.”

“Yes; but shaving you may cut yourself.”

Rosina laughed; he heard her and turned suspiciously.

“Why do you laugh?”

“Because.”

“What amuses you?”

“You do.”

He smiled and they walked one or two blocks in silence. They were now in
the suburb of Schwabing, far out by the western end of the
Englischergarten. The street was very uninteresting and comparatively
deserted.

“Do you see my cravat?” he asked.

She was wondering if they had not better be returning towards home.

“I know that you have one on,” she said; “I can’t say that I notice
anything especial about it.”

“I will show you something very curious about it.”

“You’re not going to take it off, are you?”

“I will show you how I tie it.”

“I know how to tie that kind myself.”

“Not as I tie it.”

Then he deliberately handed her his umbrella and untied his cravat, and
proceeded to turn one end up and fold the other across and poke a loop
through and draw an end under, and thus manipulate the whole into a
reproduction of the same tiny bowknot as before. She held the umbrella
and contemplated the performance with an interest which was most
flattering to his labor.

“I don’t see how you ever do it,” she exclaimed when the job was
complete and he took the umbrella again.

“I will teach you some day,” he said readily. “I have myself invented
four cravats,” he added with pride.

“Will you teach me all the four?”

“Yes; I have thought, if I shall ever be poor, to go to Paris and have a
cab and drive about from house to house each morning and tie cravats
_pour les messieurs_. You can see how many would pay for that.”

“Yes; but when you arrived and they were not ready,--were still in bed,
you know,--what would you do then?”

He reflected, and then shrugged his shoulders.

“I would put on the collar, tie the cravat, and leave monsieur to sleep
again.”

Rosina’s marital past presented her mind with a lively picture of one of
the cravat-tier’s clients struggling to bring his shirt into proper
connection with the _chef d’œuvre_, when he should arise to attire
himself for the day. She laughed outright. Then she grew sober and said:

“We ought to go back; it must be after five.”

He took out his watch.

“No, it is not.”

“Yes, it is; it was after four when we left the _pension_. I know it’s
after five now.”

“It is not after five,” he declared calmly; “it is not after five
because it is after six.”

She laughed again; he looked at her, smiling brightly himself.

“It is good together, _n’est-ce pas_?” he said, putting his hand upon
her arm as they turned back upon their steps. There was in his eyes the
happy look that dispelled every trace of the usual shadow on his face.
“We are again those same children,” he went on, “children that the same
toy amuses both. What pleasures you always makes joy for me also.”

Something came up in her throat as she listened. It might have been a
choke, but she was so positive that it was only Genoa that she swallowed
it at once and looked in the opposite direction. He had kept his hand
upon her arm, and now he bent his head a little and said, his voice
lowering:

“I think--”

The dusk was gathering heavily. The Siegesthor loomed blackly great
against the lights of the city beyond. It was no longer quiet about
them, but the hum and buzz of all the bees swarming home was in the air,
on the pavement, along the trolley wires.

“I think,”--he said, his fingers closing about her arm,--“I think that
we might be always very happy together.”

She looked up quickly, and then down yet more quickly.

“Why do you speak that way when you know that I am going so soon?”

“Let us turn here,” he said eagerly; “by here it will be quiet. Do walk
so,” he added pleadingly, as she hesitated, “we have not long to be
together. _Il faut me gâter un peu._ There is but a week left for us.”

She started.

“A week! If we sail the nineteenth we need not leave here until the
fourteenth surely.”

“But your cousin will leave on the eighth.”

She looked up at him, and by the light of a street lamp which they were
just passing, he saw the great tears starting in her eyes, tears of
helplessness, the tears of a woman who feels and cannot speak. It was a
very quiet little street, that into which they had turned, with lines of
monotonous gray houses on either side, and certainly no better place for
tears was ever invented. Rosina’s appeared to know a good thing when
they saw it, and rolled heavily downward, thus proving in their passage
the sincerity of both her nature and her color. Her companion drew her
hand within his own, pressing her fingers hard and fast. He did not say
one word, and finally she wiped her eyes, smiled through the mist that
hung upon her lashes, and said with simple directness:

“I don’t want to go.”

“I know.”

“But they want me to, and I must.”

There was another long silence, and then he said:

“You would not stay for me?”

His voice was wonderfully soft and persuasive, and for a single instant
she admitted the possibility into her mental future; but the instant
after it found itself driven violently forth again.

“No, no,” she cried, forcibly, “I will not--I cannot. I _never_ want
another husband.”

He hesitated one step in his gait and then went on as before.

“I do not say that all would be as you wished,” he said slowly, with
pauses between, “or that I would live only to joy your life. That would
be very untrue. To be with you this week I put aside as it would not be
right for me to put aside again. These days I have throw away because I
will not say all in my after life that I did not try.” He stopped and
his voice changed strangely. “I must try with all my strength,” he
continued, drawing each breath as if in great pain; “I must, because to
me with my work it is what does not trouble, what gives me sympathy,
that is the most large of all. I have never marry because I know that so
well. How could I ever do my work if a single discord is there to
fret--fret--fret? As well ask me to play in concert on an untuned
instrument. To my ear the untune is agony; to my music, a discord in my
day is death to what would have been written that day. It is so that I
have come to expect to never marry. My music must be first, and how can
I risk--” he stopped his speech and his steps. She tried to move on but
he held her still. “But,” he said, very low but with an accent the
intensity of which cut into her very heart, “but now I know that better
work would be if you were there; I should have greater force; I
should--I--if you loved--”

He trailed his speech helplessly, faltered, and was silent. The night
had come heavily down and they learned the fact by the discovery that
they could no longer look into the eyes of one another. The quiet little
street had led them down to the borders of the Englischergarten, and its
forest rose up before them. He led her straight towards it.

“It will be wet,” he said, in reply to the resistance in her arm; “but
we must be alone until I have finished all that I will to say. The trees
about us are best; we do not want cabs and streets just now.”

She felt blindly, miserably wretched.

“I don’t want to be married again,” she declared in a voice that was
thick with more tears; and then she gathered her skirt well into her
hand and they plunged together into the darkness beyond.

The park was dusk with night’s downfall and heavily misted by the day’s
rain. Its paths, usually like hard gray cement, were a slippery mosaic
of clay and brown leaves, and on either hand arose a stockade-like
effect of tree-trunks knowing no light beyond. Wind there was none to
rustle the leaves, nor sound of bird or beast. An utter and complete
silence echoed the footfalls of these two who had come into the
solitude, to the end that they might search there for a solution of
themselves.

At the first forking of their way, Rosina said timidly:

“We must not go too far; it is so lonely, I am afraid.”

Von Ibn stopped short, drew one of her arms behind his back, caught her
firmly to his bosom, and approached his face so close to hers that his
breath came and went against her lips.

“Are you frightened?” he asked.

“No,” she said, wrapt in a sort of awe at the wonder of her own
sensations, “I have the utmost faith in you.”

He loosed her instantly, and walked a little way off for a moment.

“I felt that you wished not,” he said, bitterly, “and so I held myself
back. _Mon Dieu_, how good I am to you,--how cruel to myself,--and no
thanks.”

Her heart was wrung.

“Oh, let us go back and go home,” she cried; “all this is of no use. It
makes me glad to go away, because I see now that for me to go will be
better for you.”

“And for you?” he asked, returning to her side.

“I said ‘for you,’” she answered gently.

“Then not at all for you too?”--he laid his hand insistently upon her
arm,--“not at all for you too?” he repeated.

She was silent.

“It was there in Lucerne,” he went on presently; “I knew it at
first--the first time I see you; and when I found that it wasyou
who had sent for me--I--I dared to hope that you too felt something,
even then, even so at the very first. Have you never known that
feeling?”--he exclaimed, his breath rising passionately, “has such
storm never swept within you?--and you have no other life for a while
but its longing,--no sleep but the stupid fatigue when one cannot
think more? What has my existence been since that day on the Quai by
the Vierwaldstattersee?--_Je ne peux rien faire!_--To the world I am
dead.--There is perhaps no future for me because I have learned to
love and have not learned to be loved.”

His voice broke utterly; he loosed her arm, walked apart once more, and
was once more silent.

Then her agitation suddenly found voice and to her own intense horror
she heard herself laughing--laughing a loud hysterical laughter, that
resounded hideously and was beyond her own control.

“You are amused,” he exclaimed, and his mood took on a justifiable tone
of outraged anger; “you laugh. You have made me like this and now you
laugh. If you were suffering and I had made you so, I should be ashamed
and sorry; but a woman laughs. You are as that other,” he continued,
impetuously, “and it will be the same some time after. When she had made
me wild, then she laughed. When I heard her laugh, I grew quite cold, I
cared no more, never more. Then, when I cared no more, she learned to
care, she grew to love, she wrote me many letters, she became most
miserable; but for me nothing mattered. Because I could not care more.”

Her laughter continued spasmodically in spite of her struggles to check
it. But between the paroxysms she gasped:

“I never tried--to make you love me. I never wanted you to come where I
did--”

“But now that I am all yours,” he interrupted, “now that nothing is
left for me, but you--” He paused. “What will I do now?” he added,
asking the question with a simplicity at once boyish and heartrending.

She was silent; her laughter had ceased. He came close to her and took
her hand again within his own. And then in the darkness beside him he
suddenly heard the bursting misery of her sobs.

“You weep,” he cried.

“No,” she whispered faintly, “no.”

“You weep,” he repeated slowly, and gathered her warmly and closely
within his arms.

“What is it necessary that we suffer?” he asked her softly. “Let us
cease struggling, let us be only happy,” and then he bent his head so
that his cheek touched hers, and waited for the words of her answer.
“Your heart is very near mine,” he whispered to her silence, “let it
stay near mine, let it rest mine.” Still she was silent. “_N’est-ce
pas?_” he asked, pressing her closer yet.

To her, at that instant, the darkness was flashing with strange lights,
the silence was roaring in thunder, the trees charging and whirling in
giant combat. Her head was suddenly light and then suddenly heavy; her
breath strangled her and then failed altogether. She swayed from side to
side, her head fell backward, and Von Ibn had it borne upon him, that
instead of being in love she had fainted.

“_Qu’est-ce que vous avez?_” he cried, as he felt her reeling, and then
he knew; and knowing, recognized the fact that he was alone in the
depths of the rain-soaked forest, with a helpless woman on his hands,
and that the situation was infinitely more novel than amusing.

He was obliged to let his umbrella fall in order that he might raise her
in his arms; and when she was so raised he felt a poignant wonder as to
what to do with her next. He had no idea which direction to take, for
the night was now night in good earnest, and the Englischergarten is so
large that one may walk for two hours and a half without passing its
limits. He felt uncertain as to just where they had entered it, the
common ingress not being from Schwabing, and also uncertain as to just
how far towards the centre they had penetrated. A pale, young moon
peeped up above the tree-tops; he looked at the moon and then at Rosina,
and they both appeared unnecessarily weak and inadequate to the urgent
necessities of the moment.

“She should be laid on her back and have water thrown upon her face,” he
murmured to himself in French, and then he felt his boots sinking deeply
into the mud, and recognized the impracticability of that means of
resuscitation at this particular moment.

“Why did I ever pray that I might hold her in my arms?” he thought in
German. “_Mein Gott_, what shall I do?”

Failing all other remedies, he shook her hard, and her eyes flew open on
some wax-doll-like principle. She gave him a look of complete
unrecognition, and closed them with a sigh.

“You must not faint once more,” he cried, anxiously; “you cannot, you
know.”

Something like physical despair swept over him as he felt her tremble
and sway again.

“What can I do?” he cried, shaking her very hard indeed, “we are far
from all. I cannot leave you to get a carriage, I cannot take you--”

“I don’t care what you do,” she murmured, with the usual complete
resignation of the swooning, always so exasperating to those who care
for them. He felt desperately that she was telling the truth.

There was a sound in the wilderness beyond, a sound that thrilled him
with hope and fear at the same instant. The developments of a sound may
under some circumstances prove one’s salvation or destruction. He
riveted his eyes anxiously in the direction from whence the echo of a
horse’s feet splashing through the mud was now drawing nearer each
second.

“If it prove the Prinz Regent himself,” he said decidedly, “he must take
us in.”

It proved to be, not a royal coach, but a mere ordinary cab, than which
nothing more welcome had ever crossed his vision in all his life before.
He hailed the cabman, and the cabman stopped in the greatest possible
astonishment, and was good enough to descend in the mud and open the
door. He asked no questions--cabmen never do--but took the address,
mounted to his seat, and put his horse to a rounder trot in the
direction of the city.

Rosina leaned back in her corner and shook as if she had the ague. Her
hands and feet were icy cold; Von Ibn took her hands in his and feared
that she was ill, or going to be so.

“What did make you like that?” he asked, as the wheels dashed the
mud-spatters up against the windows; “was it that I distress you, yes?”

“Yes,” she sighed.

Then he kissed her hands.

“Forgive me,” he said, contritely, “I have not meant it so. There in the
trees, when you were unconscious, I did not kiss you, I did not touch
even your hair,--not thirty men in all Germany had been so good as that.
You see what I try to be for you.”

He was leaning over her, the blood seemed to be boiling up into her
ears. She put up her hand:

“If you speak so,” she said, “I shall faint again; I get dizzy when you
talk to me in that way.”

“But if I kiss you only once,” he whispered.

“No--no--no,” she reiterated, and raised her hand and pushed his lips
away with it.

“_En effet vous n’êtes pas du tout gentille_,” he cried, in violent
anger, for his moods knew no shading in their transposition from one to
another; “you are cold and without heart. How long do you think that I
stood there in the wet and hold you back from the mud, and now you will
do nothing for me; and you were quite heavy too, and--oh, _mon Dieu_!”
he exclaimed sharply, interrupting himself, “my umbrella!”

“Have you lost it?”

“Have I lost it? Naturally I have let it fall to upraise you, and now I
have leave it there.”

“I will give you another,” she said pacifically.

“Another,” he commented scornfully; “do you think that I have no other?”
Then his weathercock cast of mind whirled again: “I do not want an
umbrella,” he said more forcefully, “I want a kiss.”

“I thought that you were distressed over losing it.”

“Not at all; I have already very many others. But a kiss from you I have
never yet.”

He seized her hand again, and tearing off the glove with a haste that
demolished two buttonholes, pressed the bare cold fingers to his lips
and eyes and forehead.

“Oh, I do love you!” he cried in a fresh storm of feeling. “You _must_
love me, because my much _must_ make of you a little.”

Then he kissed her hand many times more, stopping his rapid caresses to
gaze upon her with that curious, burning glow firing the sombreness of
his eyes the while he held her wrist against the fever of his face.

“If I obeyed myself,” he said hoarsely, “how I would hold you and kiss
you. _Je vous embrasserais tellement!_”

She wondered why she was not distressed and alarmed. Instead the awe at
her own emotion that had come upon her spirit in the wood was with her
again. Something like strength seemed rising within her, and what it
rose against was--strangely enough--not him, but herself. She was
conscious of a sympathy for him in place of any fear for herself.

She looked from the window and saw that they were now rolling rapidly
through the brightly lighted streets, and a glimpse of the Hof told her
that the end was but five minutes further on.

“You answer not,” he said, insistently; “you must say me some word.”

“Oh, what can I say?” she cried helplessly.

“Say that you love me.”

“But I do not.”

Then he loosed her hand and ground his teeth.

“Decidedly you are queer,” he said bitterly; “it is there in your eyes
and you will to deny it. You are senseless,--_vous n’avez pas de
cœur!_ I am always a fool to go on as I go.”

She turned her eyes upon him.

“_Je ne suis pas pour vous_,” she said gently and very, very sadly;
“_mais je ne suis pour personne non plus_,” she added, and there was a
tone in her voice that he had never heard before. His temper faded
instantly.

“You think of me with kindness, always,--_n’est-ce pas_?” he said,
returning her look.

Their eyes rested steadily upon each other for a little space. Then he
exclaimed:

“You do love me,” and started to seize her in his arms forgetful of
lights, streets, passers-by, and all other good reasons for
self-restraint.

But just then the cab stopped before the door of No. 6, the cabman
descended.

There was no further question as to _les convenances_.

Chapter Twelve

    “BUDA-PESTH.

    “DEAR ROSINA,--If you’re laid up I might just as well take a
    week more in this direction. Plenty to see, I find, and lots of
    jolly company lying around loose. I’ll get back about the
    twelfth and we’ll plan to skip then as fast as we can. Keep on
    writing Poste Restante, Buda, and I’ll have them forward. Don’t
    try to fool me any by being too sick to sail. I’ve got to go the
    nineteenth and you must too.

    “Lovingly,
        “JACK.”

She sat in the little salon the night of October fifth and read the
above affectionate epistle which the postman had brought to keep her
company, because every one else in the house was gone to the famous
concert of the famous pianist.

She could not go; that little episode in the Englischergarten and all
the attendant agitation had put her in bed for three days and rendered
her quite unable to go out for two or three more. She had been obliged
to write Jack that she was ill, with the above results, and she read his
answer with the sensation that life was long, the future empty, and
none of its vistas worth contemplating. Her heart ached dully--it was
forever aching dully these days, and she--

There was a tap at the door. Europe has no open-door policy, be it
known; all doors are always shut. Even those of _pension_ salons.

She looked up, and saw him coming in, his violin case in his hand. Then
life and its vistas underwent a great transformation, because he smiled
upon her and, putting the case down carefully, came eagerly to kiss her
hand.

“_Vous allez bien ce soir?_” he asked pleasantly, standing before her
chair and looking down into her face.

“Oh, I am almost well, thank you; but why are you not gone to the
concert?”

He pointed to his violin with a smile.

“It is a concert that I bring to you who may not go out,” he said.

“But you are making a tremendous sacrifice for me, monsieur.”

He stood before her, twisting his moustache.

“It is that I am regretful for the other night,” he said briefly, “for
that I am glad to give the concert up and make you some pleasure. The
other night--”

“Don’t,” she pleaded uncomfortably; “never mind all that. Let it all
go.”

“But I would ask your pardon. _J’étais tout-à-fait fou!_”

“If I have anything to forgive it shall be forgiven you when you play.
Do so now, please. Oh, you have no idea how impatient I am to hear you.”

He stared through her and beyond her for several seconds, and then came
back to himself with a start.

“Then I do play,” he exclaimed, and went to where he had placed the case
of rosewood, and lifting it from the small table, set it on the floor
and knelt before it, as a priest at some holy shrine. She leaned her
head against the chair back and watched him, her eyes searching each
detail of his appearance without her spirit being cognizant of the
hunger which led to the seeking, of the soul-cry which strove to fortify
itself against the inevitable that each hour was bringing nearer.

He felt in his pocket for his key-ring, chose from the many one
particular key, inserted it, turned it, left it sticking in the hole,
and then, with a curious breathless tightening of the lips, he raised
the lid, put aside the knit wool shield of white and violet, and with
the tender care which a mother bestows upon a very tiny baby lifted the
violin from its resting-place. As he did so his eye travelled with a
sudden keen anxiety over its every detail, as if the possibility of harm
was ever present, and as he held it to his ear and snapped the strings
one after another, she beheld with something akin to awe the dawning of
another nature upon his face, of another light within his eyes, the
strange light of that abnormal, unworldly gift which God gave man and
which we have elected to call by the name of genius. As he rested there
before her, tightening one cord, trying another, listening to a third,
she realized--with a sorrowful sense of her own remoteness at the
minute--that this man was some one who, in spite of all their hours of
intercourse, she had never met before.

He loosened the bow from its buttons and rose slowly to his feet. His
eyes sought hers, and he said dreamily:

“What shall I play?” even while his fingers were forming dumb notes, and
the uplifted bow quivered in the air as if impatient.

“Oh,” she said, acutely conscious of her inferiority,--of the ten
thousand leagues of difference between his grandeur and her
commonplace,--“play what you will.”

He hardly seemed to hear, his eyes roved over the little salon as if its
walls were gone, and he beheld a horizon illimitless. He just slightly
knit his brows and then he bowed his head above the instrument and said
briefly:

“Listen!”

And she listened.

And the unvoiceable wonder of his magic!

It was an intangible echo of the Tonhalle at Zurich, with the music that
they had heard there sounding as the waves lapped up against the
embankment and the crowd laughed and chatted after; those strains to
which she had then been deaf on account of her agitation came back now,
and the thrill of her pain was there still, rising and falling amidst
the music and the water breaking up against the stones. While she waited
on the verge of tears, the whole shifted to Constance, and through the
slow sweep of the steamers coming into the harbor sounded the “Souvenir”
of Vieuxtemps, drifting across the rose-laden air and carrying her back
to the minutes when--Ah, when! She put her hand before her eyes and it
was not the cords of his violin, but the sinews of her soul which
responded to his bow. That which man may not voice he played, and that
which our ears may not hear she absorbed into the depths of her being.
Something within them each burst bonds and met at last, but neither knew
it then, and the wonder carried her out upon the bosom of the Bodensee,
showed her the charm of its gracious peace, and then drifted as the
breezes drift, to the concert in the open air that is given each day by
the Feldherrnhalle, a concert that knows no discord, because the murmur
of life, the calls of the birds, the splashing of the fountains, and the
light-hearted joy of the crowd around, all meet and mingle in its
chorus. He echoed them all with the sublimity of the power which he
controlled, and all--bird-calls, fountain-drip, desultory laughter, and
careless joy, all flowed from him, and took from him as they flowed that
subtle and precious subconsciousness which lines our every cloud with
the infinite hope that is better than all else in this world.

She leaned forward breathlessly, her fingers interlaced around her
knees; her eyes had grown as dark as his own, her heart stood still, and
between its throbs she asked herself if _this_ was the secret of their
sympathy,--if _this_ was the basis of his mastery.

Then there was silence in the room and he stood motionless, his eyes on
the floor, the violin still resting against his shoulder in its rightful
position, above his heart, quite touching his head.

She did not speak and he did not speak,--neither knew for how long that
period of silence endured. But after a while he lowered the instrument
and looked at her.

“You like, yes?” he said with a faint smile.

“Can you ask?”

He laid his hand upon a vase that sat upon the table and shook his head.

“All this is not good, you know,” he said, as if communing with himself
alone; “here is no room for the music to spread. All these,” he pointed
to another ornament, “are so very, very bad. But some day, perhaps,” he
added, with another smile, “you will hear me in a good place.”

Then he raised the violin to position once more.

“Choose what you will have,” he told her.

“Oh, forget that I am here,” she pleaded, speaking with a startled
hushedness, as if no claim of conventional politeness might dare intrude
itself upon that bewildering hour, “do not remember that I am
here,--play as you would if you were quite alone.”

“That is very well,” he said, with a recurrence to his unseeing stare
and dreamy tone, “because for me you really are not here. Nothing is
here;--the violin is not here;--I am myself not here;--only the music
exists. And if I talk,” he added slowly, “the inspiration may leave
me.”

He went beside the piano and turned his back towards her, and then his
prayer made itself real and his love found words....

She wept, and when he ceased to play he remained standing in silence as
the very reverent rest for a short interval after the termination of
holy service....

After a while he moved to where the case lay open on the floor and knelt
again, laying his instrument carefully in its place and covering it with
its little knit wool quilt. Then he locked the lid down, replaced the
keys in his pocket, and, rising, seemed to return to earth.

“Can you understand now,” he asked, taking a chair by her side,--“can
you understand now how it would be for me if I lost my power to create
music?”