Atlantis

When he awoke rather late the next morning, Frederick was astonished to find everything about him standing still. The bed was not pitching, the glasses and water basin were not rattling, the floor was not sloping downward, nor were the walls tumbling on his head. The grey light of a cloudy winter day coming through the window by no means made an unpleasant or cheerless impression.

He rang, and Petronilla appeared. The young lady, she said, had awakened, looking well and rosy, and had already breakfasted. She handed him a note from Willy Snyders, saying exactly where he could be found at different times during the forenoon and that he would be back for lunch at quarter past twelve.

Frederick took the second bath he had had within twelve or fourteen hours. They had laid out fresh underwear and several perfectly new suits of Bonifacius Ritter's for him to choose from; and he sat down to breakfast a "newborn" man. Petronilla herself brought in breakfast. While serving, she told him everybody, even all the servants, had gone out. She left the room, and returned a few moments later to ask if there was anything else he wished.

"Nothing, thank you."

She then requested permission to go out for about an hour and a half to purchase various trifles for the signorina. Soon after, Frederick saw the excellent housekeeper, all muffled up, step from the front door into the wet, almost deserted street.

After he had made this observation, he became uneasy, lit a cigarette, screwed his right eye meditatively, and bit his lips. The house was empty. For that reason his heart was audibly knocking against his ribs. Again the fantastic incalculableness of life struck him as so remarkable. An occasion, a condition such as this he had scarcely hoped to reach in weeks, or even months, certainly not in the wild welter of New York. From the noise of the steamer and the city, from the rushing and roaring of the Atlantic Ocean, he was suddenly plunged into the silence of the grave. It affected him with a sense of desertion and oblivion. In that city of four million inhabitants, each man was strenuously pursuing his own affairs, or was harnessed into an iron yoke of duties, which deafened and blinded him to everything beside the path he had to tread.

Frederick looked at his watch. It was twelve minutes past ten. His uneasiness increased. He was unable to sit still. Each nerve, each cell of his body was touched and excited by invisible forces storming upon him from all sides. A force of this nature, penetrating walls, floors and ceilings, has been called by various names. We speak of magnetism, of od, of electricity. As for electricity, Frederick just then had a peculiar experience of it. He was trying to find composure in front of the open fireplace; and whenever he touched metal with the tongs, crackling little sparks shot out. Everything in the room seemed to be charged. If he merely ran his finger tips lightly over the rug before the hearth, there were little flashes and reports, like the crack of a tiny whip.

"There they are," he thought, smiling, "the Toilers of the Light." And while he racked his brain to recall in what book of fairy tales he had read of those diminutive elves, the dream he had had on the Roland occurred to him. "Toilers of the Light, what are you doing?" he asked several times, and snatched after the sparks, as one snatches after flies in a fit of impatience and boredom. It seemed to him that countless numbers of those little children of Lucifer were pricking his blood like so many dancing stars. Even the air was filled with stars. They clogged his breathing. He arose and walked out into the hall.

As he paced up and down there for a while, undecided what to do, making as little sound on the bricks as possible, he looked into the kitchen, which, like the dining-room, was in the basement, and convinced himself that it was empty. Then he softly ascended the marble steps to the next floor, where he tried with all his might to check the rise of a passion almost robbing him of his senses. In that endeavour he entered the library, a room comfortably furnished and well equipped with appurtenances for reading and writing. The walls were covered with views of ancient Rome and engravings by Piranesi. But neither the city of the Tiber nor the grave of Cecilia Metella, nor the Colosseum, nor the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli had the power to engage his real attention.

He was out in the hall again, though hesitating still whether to mount to the first story. For a while he stood uncertain, clinging with both hands to the wooden post of the balustrade, his head sunk on his hands, and his whole body shivering as in a chill. Then he raised his head. His eyes were fixed. He seemed a different person.

In that moment Frederick comprehended the passionate speech of his body, and sanctioned its demands. The thing that now came to the fore, despite all the grief that had been gathering in him, despite all his spiritual conflicts, his bitter mental convictions and self-condemnations, despite his repugnance, his horror, his compassion and his hesitating and delaying, the thing that came to the fore was the suppressed, unsatisfied demand of his body. In the silence of the morning in that strange house, it suddenly assumed an elemental, indomitable force. It would have overridden the firmest will opposing it. But Frederick's will did not oppose it. His clear, firm intention approved it, strengthened it, and made its power invincible. He entered Ingigerd's room. She was sitting at the open fireplace in a dressing-gown of Petronilla's purchasing, and was drying the masses of her long, light hair.

"Oh, Doctor von Kammacher!" she cried in slight alarm, and fixed her shimmering sea-green eyes upon the man standing there with eyes almost closed, breathing heavily, incapable of uttering a word. As by hypnotic influence, a helpless look of self-abandonment, of complete melting away spread over her face.

The sight of her expression robbed Frederick all the more of self-control. At last the time had come to extinguish the fires tormenting him in one wild, greedy draught. With the hoarse cry of a beast and the fury of a man dying of thirst, he plunged deep into the slowly, slowly cooling waves of love.

It was nearly eleven o'clock when Petronilla returned. She was accompanied by an errand boy and a fair-haired young man, who was not dressed with the elegance of the residents of the club-house. His feet were heavily shod. While waiting in the hall he waved a wet umbrella with his sinewy left hand and a worn felt hat with his right hand, whistled very skilfully, and paced noisily to and fro in long strides, as if entirely at home in the place.

Petronilla summoned Frederick. With an almost passionate outcry of welcome, the one of the two men ran up the stairs, two steps at a time, and the other down the stairs twice as fast. They kissed and shook hands vigorously.

Frederick's early visitor was Peter Schmidt, of whom he had dreamed on the Roland. He had read Frederick's name in the newspaper among the survivors and had come from his home in Meriden, several hours' ride from New York, to see his old friend. The paper also gave Frederick's address, the reporters having got hold of it through his connection with the celebrity, Ingigerd Hahlström.

The first question Frederick asked after the storm of greeting had subsided, was, "I say, old boy, do you believe in telepathy?"

"Telepathy? Not a bit," replied the Friesian, and laughed a mighty laugh. "I am scarcely thirty, and sound in mind and body. I'm not an idiot. I hope no Mr. Slade has turned your head like old Zöllner's in Leipzig. Have you come over to preside at a theosophical or spiritualistic meeting? Then good-bye to our friendship, old fellow."

This was the familiar tone to which the friends were accustomed from their university days. It was infinitely refreshing to both to hear it again. No conventions of any sort divided them. Their relations were free of everything that hampers association in later years.

"You've been through a thing or two," his friend said, when Frederick confirmed the newspaper account of his having witnessed the sinking of the Roland. "I believe you're a married man and have children and are living in Germany, and as an avocation are doing scientific work, while practising medicine as a vocation. You were thinking of everything else in the world but a trip to America, which never had any charms for you."

"Isn't it weird," said Frederick, "how one suddenly finds oneself in a place one never dreamt of, arriving there in ways most unforeseen and at a time most unforeseen? And doesn't it seem as if the life we lived eight years ago, which was so choke-full of actuality, of real living, had all of a sudden turned to nothing?"

Peter Schmidt proposed, since they were both peripatetic philosophers, to take a walk through the streets of New York. Frederick went to consult Ingigerd. He found that for the next few hours she would be completely taken up with dressmakers. All she said was that she hoped to see him again at luncheon. Soon after, the two friends were walking along the asphalt paths of Central Park, swept clean of snow, under the bare, snowy trees between snowy lawns, while the mad city around them filled the air with a hundred-tongued Dionysiac uproar.

Though there had been an interruption of eight years in their intercourse, they took up the threads of conversation as if they had parted only half an hour before. Within a short time, each had told the other the most important facts of their lives during those eight years. Frederick for his account of himself had to go back to the date of his marriage, the notice of which he had sent to Peter Schmidt. Without departing from the truth, he related his story with a certain fancifulness, and though stating facts, mingled in psychological effects and spiritual crises. He did not refrain from telling how he had been uprooted and torn this way and that. The first and final achievement of his former life, he said, was that he had acquired the will to resignation, though the tone of his voice, as a result of his morning's experience and his meeting with his best friend, was fresh and vigorous, by no means tinged with the drab of resignation.

Peter Schmidt's account of himself, in contrast, was very brief. All he had to report was that his marriage had remained childless and his wife, a physician, overwhelmed with a sort of midwife practice, had to fight against the climate and was sick with longing for her father and mother and her Swiss mountains.

Nostalgia, Frederick suggested, was probably the universal ill from which all Germans in America suffered. The Friesian refused to admit it, and Frederick observed in unchanged form that characteristic in his friend which made of him at once the well-informed practical man of affairs and the undismayed ideologist. As ideologist, he hoped for the best for humanity's future in America, for that reason refusing to admit that a large number of the inhabitants of the United States had not yet struck root, spiritually speaking, in the land of liberty.

A newsboy with a heavy pack of papers, seeing the Germans laughing and talking and gesticulating in the Park, which at that hour was not much frequented, came toward them, holding out a paper. Peter Schmidt, who had always been a great devourer of newspapers, bought several.

"There you are," he said, unfolding one of the immense sheets. "The Roland, the Roland, and still the Roland, columns and pages of the Roland."

Frederick clutched at his head.

"Was I really on the Roland?" he exclaimed.

"Very much so, it seems," said Schmidt. "Here you are in black type. 'Doctor Frederick von Kammacher performs miracles of bravery.' And here they have a picture of you."

The artist of The World had with a few strokes dashed off a young man, the replica of a million others of his kind, descending into a life-boat on a rope ladder from the top deck of a half-submerged steamer and carrying on his back a young lady wearing nothing but a shift.

"Did you really do it?" asked Peter Schmidt.

"I don't think so," said Frederick. "I must admit the details of the accident are not very clear in my mind any more." Frederick stood still, turned pale, and tried to recollect. "I don't know," he said, "what is most fearful about such an event, the things that really occurred, or the fact that one gradually digests it and forgets it." Still standing in the middle of the path, he continued: "What strikes a man hardest is the absurdity of it, the stupid senselessness of it, the superlative brutality. We know nature's brutality in theory; but to be able to live, we must forget it in its real extent, in its gruesome actuality. The most enlightened modern man somehow and somewhere in his soul still believes in something like an all-beneficent God. But such an experience gives that 'somehow' and 'somewhere' an unmerciful drubbing with iron fists. And I have come from the sinking of the Roland with a spot in my soul deaf and dumb and numb. It has not awakened to life yet. The brutalisation is so extreme that while it is still fresh in one's mind, one would as soon express belief in God or man or the future of humanity or in a Utopia, or anything else of the sort, as give utterance to something that one knows to be a vile deception. What is the sense of our sentimentalising over man's dignity, his divine destiny, when such fearful, inane injustice is wrought upon innocent persons and cannot be undone?"

Frederick turned very pale. He was seized by a violent attack of nausea. His lids opened wide, his eyes popped with a curious expression of horror. He trembled slightly, and in some alarm clutched impetuously at his friend's arm. His brain reeled dully as he felt the ground beneath his feet beginning to heave.

"I have never had anything like this before," he said. "I think the accident has left me with something."

Peter Schmidt led his friend to a bench, which fortunately happened to be close by. He saw it was a nervous attack. Frederick's hands turned numb, cold sweat broke out on his body, and he suddenly fell over in a faint. When he awoke, it took some time for him to recognise his surroundings. He said things meant for somebody else. He thought he saw his wife, then his children, and then his father in full uniform. When he regained complete consciousness, he implored his friend to keep the incident a secret. Peter Schmidt promised he would.

"My opinion is," he said, "that your over-wrought, over-taxed nerves are in revolt. They are taking revenge and at the same time curing themselves."

"Though I have inherited the strongest constitution from both my father's and mother's sides," said Frederick, "yet, from last summer on, I have been assailed by so many things that I have long been expecting a collapse. I know this will not be the last attack. I should have cause for rejoicing were the condition not to become chronic."

"Oh," said Schmidt, "you may have two or three more attacks, but if you live quietly for a few months, they may never recur again."

In coming out of his swoon Frederick, as he himself said, returned from a trip around the world. He had travelled through the axis of the earth to the antipodes, which actually did hang head downward.

"I felt as if I had been dead and had come back to life," he said, trying to give his friend a conception of the remarkable state through which he had passed. "It was not like being asleep. During the first part of my dreams, I felt as if I had been something like a block of granite for hundreds of years. On awaking I stood in the shadow of the deepest abyss. I saw subterranean landscapes, gigantic caves, heavens of stone, enormous Adelsberg grottoes. Something lifted me up. The only thing I can compare it to was the way a diver must feel who slowly, slowly rises to brighter and brighter regions from ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea. I felt as if I were forcing myself up out of the grave. I re-lived my whole conscious life from my babyhood up to this very day. You can imagine what a medley it was of nurses, military expeditions, cramming for examinations, confirmations, birthdays, marriages, sick-beds and death-beds. At the end I went through the whole sinking of the Roland again. And when you called me, I heard you in spite of my paralysed condition, but I saw you coming out of an inn on the quay of the little harbour where Columbus's flag-ship was slowly decaying."

"All right, all right, Friedericus Rex," Peter Schmidt soothed him. Friedericus Rex had been Frederick's nickname at the university. "Never mind," Peter continued, in a tone clearly revealing that he took Frederick's dreams to be a symptom of his over-wrought nerves. "Don't think of it, don't think of anything, old man. Let your ganglion cells rest."

Frederick assured Peter that he felt like one newly arisen to a new world and had rested better than he had for years. While they walked on together, Peter Schmidt tried to speak only of the mechanical, physiological causes of the attack. After a while, the friends regained their old liveliness and began to talk of other things. From now on, Peter Schmidt was careful never to mention the sinking of the Roland in Frederick's presence.

"We are near Ritter's studio," Schmidt said. "If you like, we might drop in for a while."

Frederick agreed, again begging his friend not to refer to his nervous attack.

"It was very astute of me, or of the wire-puller above us, to postpone my fit until the very moment you were with me," he said.

Several times within the next few hours, Schmidt had occasion to be struck by Frederick's evident belief in predestination and the superstition that clung to him from his crossing of the Atlantic.

The street that Bonifacius Ritter's studios were on adjoined Central Park. In the first room, a man in a round paper cap of his own making was at work taking a plaster cast of a man. His cap and his smock and trousers, or as much of his trousers as showed from under his smock and above his slippers, were covered with hardened daubs of clay. Death-masks, casts of antique statues, and anatomical studies of the human body, in whole or part, hung on all the walls. When the workman left the room to announce the visitors the model, whose upper body, nude to the hips, showed the brawny development of an athlete, began to speak to Frederick and Peter.

"What won't a man do to earn his bit of daily bread!" he said. "I am from Pirna"—he pronounced it "Berna," speaking in a round Saxon dialect—"and I tell you, it's no joke for fellows like me in this damned New York. At first I earned my living as a professional strong man. Then my boss failed, and I had to give up my outfit, my iron bars and my weights and everything I needed for my job. I can carry twelve hundred pounds on my stomach."

Ritter sent word asking the gentlemen to come to his private studio. They passed through a room in which a stately young lady was working without a model at an almost completed portrait bust in clay. In the next room, three or four marble-cutters were making a great noise hammering and chiselling imperturbably, without glancing up, at marble blocks of various sizes. From this room, a cast-iron circular stairway led up to a narrow skylight studio, where Bonifacius Ritter received Frederick and Peter.

It was a delight merely to behold the young master in his slimness and elegance. When the men entered, he removed his left hand from the pocket of his light smock, tossed away his burning cigarette, and greeted them with evident pleasure, blushing like a girl. He ushered them into a small room adjoining, lighted by a single window of antique stained glass from a French church. The low ceiling was coffered in weathered oak, and the walls were panelled in wood to a height of about six feet. A heavy oak table with benches on three sides took up nearly half the length of the room. The front of the room was partially blocked up by a genuine Nuremberg stove with the precious Delft tiles of antique green glaze testifying to the wonderful old potter's art. Willy Snyders had chanced upon the beautiful Renaissance piece in a shop near the wharf, and had succeeded in buying it for Ritter for only one hundred dollars.

"Here's a comfortable corner of the Fatherland," said Ritter. "Willy planned it all, collected all the stuff, and attended to the entire furnishing."

The university student in Frederick, the thorough German in him was surprised and delighted. Though the room looked like the cell of a St. Jerome, or, better still, the study of an Erasmus, it nevertheless resembled in its least details the dim sanctum of a German Weinstube, and all the more so when a young man in a blue apron, a stone-cutter's helper, who might equally well have been a wine-cellar keeper, brought in a bottle of old Rhine wine and several coloured hock glasses.

The wonderful poetry of their student days long past descended upon the friends. Frederick was still in a state of excitement and irrational recklessness. He pinned his faith to the moment, ready to stake his yesterday and his morrow upon it. The twilight of the room brought back memories of youthfully blissful times. He had found his old friend again and a new friend of the same warmth of temperament and of the same German ways, far from the old home. Settling himself snugly in the corner by the window, like a man intending to take his ease in a restaurant, he touched glasses with the others and uttered an exclamation of rapture.

"You'll never get me to budge from this corner, Mr. Ritter—though," he added, "I should first like to see your works."

"No hurry about that," said Ritter gaily, at the same time bringing an album bound in pigskin, in which he asked Frederick and Schmidt to write their names. Then he opened a very practical closet reaching to the floor, one of Willy's contrivances, and took out a carved wooden figure, a German Madonna by Till Riemenschneider. The sweet oval of her lovely face was not so much that of a Madonna as of a real German Gretchen.

"Willy Snyders told me," Ritter explained, "that he bought it from a rascal of a New York customs official, a man of German extraction, whose father had been a cabinet-maker in Ochsenfurt. The figure comes from the town-hall there and had been taken to the cabinet-maker for repair. He substituted another freshly painted figure, which the good folk of Ochsenfurt greeted with joy as the original greatly beautified and rejuvenated. Thus, Willy Snyders. I am not responsible for the version," he concluded laughing. "But one thing is certain, it's a genuine Riemenschneider."

The lovely statue by the Würzburg master radiated a vivid charm, which with the spell of the small room, decorated with such tender affection for old memories, and the greenish-golden sparkle of the Rhine wine in the hock glasses, brought back the German home in all its deep-seated force and beauty—a beauty, it is true, unintelligible, and therefore non-existent, to the average German of to-day.

"Once I followed up Tillman Riemenschneider's works," said Ritter. "I started at Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and went down the valley of the Tauber past Kreglingen, and so forth, as far as Würzburg. I am confident of recognising every piece of his at first glance, especially his Madonnas. They have almost completely cast off the Gothic, and no other sculptor in wood of his time knew so well how to treat the peach bloom of a woman's skin or the charm of a woman's face and body. His women are the pick of the lovely girls of Würzburg and its surroundings. Each one is adorably beautiful. Here is Veit Stoss." He took a portfolio from a shelf filled with portfolios. "Veit Stoss is superior to Riemenschneider in force of temperamental expression; he has capacities in his passions that make him superior, or at least equal, to Rembrandt." Ritter spread before them several reproductions of the master, showing the seriousness and sorrow inspiring all his works. "Nevertheless," he said, "Riemenschneider holds his own against him for the very reason that he differs from him so absolutely."

"The obstinate resistance of the Gothic," said Frederick, "the nightmare condition of mediæval Christianity, its fearful revelling in pain, its ardour for suffering had to give way to the clear, healthy vision of a burgher. The atmosphere clears, the garments acquire a natural flow of line, erring flesh begins to blossom forth—"

"Tillman Riemenschneider's portraits are unsurpassed by any works, ancient or modern, unsurpassed, I say, by the very best," Ritter reiterated.

Willy Snyders entered with a great bluster. He had come directly from his work in the offices of an interior decorating firm.

"I say, Ritter," he said, shaking hands with the men, "if you think I'm not thirsty, you're very much mistaken." He examined the bottle. "The deuce! Without me to help him, the wretch taps one of the twenty bottles of Johannisberger with which a Chicago pork packer presented him when he made a portrait of his humpbacked daughter. Well, now that one is gone, another may as well follow. Gentlemen, isn't this a jolly place for little carousals?" Pointing to the Madonna from Ochsenfurt-on-the-Main. "Isn't she a smart little body? She certainly is not by Pappe. I myself collect nothing but Japanese works." The fact seemed quite to accord with his appearance. "I'm nothing but a poor dog now, but inside of four or five years I intend to have the wherewithal, and the collecting of things Japanese will proceed by electricity. There's no race that can compete with those fellows in art. But now I want to tell you something." He turned to Ritter. "With your kind permission, I'll go call Lobkowitz and, what is more, I'll call Miss Eva. Just now, as I passed through her room, she told me she would like to meet the hero of the Roland." Without awaiting an answer, he left the room; and within a few moments Lobkowitz, who collaborated with Ritter, and Miss Burns, the pupil, appeared.

After the conventional greetings were over, the little Madonna was used as a welcome occasion for starting conversation again, which had begun to lag a bit on the entrance of the newcomers. Willy held the statue, a little less than three feet high, against different panels of the wall to see how it looked for permanent placing there. A spot was finally chosen, and the Madonna was fastened to it temporarily.

The stone-cutter's helper brought another bottle of the heavy, expensive wine, more hock glasses, large Delft plates, and a mountain of sandwiches. Though Frederick and Peter had declared they must end their too lengthy visit, a fresh wave of conviviality swept over the company and held them on. A half hour passed, and another half hour, and a whole hour, and still the new friends were sitting over their German wine and still they were discussing that inexhaustible theme so dear to all of them, German art.

"It is an eternal shame," said Frederick, "that the spirit which created the art of the old Greeks cannot be united with that profound German spirit, an entirely new spirit, which characterises the works of Adam Krafft, Veit Stoss, and Peter Vischer."

"Doctor von Kammacher," Miss Burns asked, "have you ever done any work in sculpture?" Miss Burns spoke a correct German. Her father was a Dutchman, her mother a German, and when her parents settled in London, she was only a child of three.

"Doctor von Kammacher exudes talent at every pore," said Willy, answering in Frederick's place. "I can testify to it." Willy Snyders' passion for collecting had manifested itself while he was still a boy. Among his treasures had been some copies of so-called "beer gazettes," humorous sheets got up to be read at German students' merrymaking. The copies in his possession contained sketches by Frederick, both of a humorous and serious character.

"I exude talent?" Frederick exclaimed, blushing. "Never, Willy. I beg of you, Miss Burns, don't believe that enthusiast of a schoolboy. If I really have talent, those sketches of mine in beer gazettes wouldn't prove it. As a matter of fact, I once did do some work in art. Why should I deny that, like all silly children of between sixteen and twenty, I dabbled in painting, sculpture, and literature? Once my father had to bring me to reason because I was all afire for going on the stage. Later, I wanted to throw everything to the winds to enter politics and revolutionise society by working for a party which has never even existed, a German-Social party. I leave you to judge how flighty I was and how much talent I had for art. But I love art, with a love stronger, I think, now than ever before, because everything in the world beside art has become problematical to me. I would rather have carved a wooden Mary like this"—indicating the statue by Riemenschneider—"than have been Robert Koch and Helmholtz rolled into one. Of course, I am speaking purely subjectively. I know how great Koch and Helmholtz are, and I have the profoundest admiration for both."

"See here! See here! What's the matter with us, Friedericus?" cried Peter Schmidt, jumping to his feet. Though the artists had great fondness and respect for Peter Schmidt and went to him for advice, yet, whenever he was with them, a violent discussion invariably arose whether art or science deserves precedence in the field of human culture, Peter, of course, championing the cause of science. "If you were to throw that wooden statue into the fire," he said, "it would burn like wood. Neither the wood nor the immortal art infusing it resists fire. And once it burns to ashes, it can, of course, be of no significance to the world's progress. The world is full of marvellous gods and mothers of God, and so far as I know, they never cast a single ray of light into the night of the darkest ignorance."

"I'm not saying anything against science," Frederick declared laughing, "I am merely speaking of a very unsettled man's love of art. So be at ease, Peter."

"If sculpture really attracts you," said Miss Burns, who had given her exclusive attention to Frederick, "why don't you begin right away to model here under Mr. Ritter? Begin to-morrow."

"I can't say I know very much about wood-carving," said Ritter, gaily. "However, I am entirely at Doctor von Kammacher's disposal."

"I cannot leave my little Madonna, my wooden Mother of God," cried Frederick, flushed with the wine, rising and holding up his glass. The others followed his example, laughing; and they drank to the little Madonna, each with a secret thought linking Frederick's outburst with the girl in the club-house. The glasses rang, and Frederick continued rather daringly: "I wish it had been granted me to do with divine intelligence and human hands, as Goethe said, what the animal man can and must do with the animal woman." He made a cup of his hands as if to dip up water. "I feel my Madonna in the hollow of my hands like a homunculus. She is alive there. The palms of my hands are warm. They are a golden shell. Conceive my Madonna to be a hand's breadth high, of live ivory, and imagine some rosy flecks here and there on her. Imagine her robed in the garments that Godiva wore, that is, nothing but her hair of flowing sunbeams, and so on, and so on." Frederick began to improvise poetry.

I'll say no more. I'll merely add that I should like to carve that Madonna in German linden-wood and give her all the colours of life itself, and then die, for all I care."

Frederick's enthusiastic outburst was received with great applause.

Eva Burns was a beautiful young woman of over twenty-five years, imposing and perhaps somewhat masculine in appearance. Her German was rather hard, suggesting to a hypercritical person that her tongue was too thick for her mouth, like a parrot's. Her abundant hair was parted in the middle and drawn over her ears. Her figure was broad, stately, and perfectly formed. While Frederick spoke, and even after he had done speaking, she looked at him with searching interest in her large, intelligent, meditative eyes. Finally she said:

"You really ought to try to do it."

Eva Burns was one of those knowing, companionable women that are always welcome and never disturbing in a company of men. Her eyes and Frederick's eyes met, and the young scholar answered her in a tone of mixed raillery and gallantry:

"Miss—Miss—"

"Burns," Willy helped him, "Miss Burns from Birmingham."

"Miss Burns from Birmingham, you said something of great significance. On you be the blame if the world is impoverished by the loss of a poor physician and enriched by the addition of a poor sculptor."

It had grown dark, and they lighted three large candles of the finest bee's wax in the chandelier above the table.

"I have no objections," Schmidt several times interjected in the debate, "I have no objections to your trying to help toward the evolution of sublimer types by means of divine intelligence and human hands; for all I care, by means of divine intelligence alone, that is, by means of reason. The very same, if you will allow it, is the object, the ultimate object, of the science of medicine. A day is coming when artificial selection among human beings will be obligatory." The artists burst out laughing, but Schmidt continued unabashed. "And another day, a still more beautiful day, is coming when persons like ourselves will be considered like, well, let us say at the utmost, the African Bushmen."

The candles had almost burned to the bottom when the little company decided it was time to break up. It was a half holiday, the stone-cutters had stopped work sooner than usual, and the other rooms were dark and deserted. The artists used the stumps of the candles to light the company about. In passing through the first studio, Lobkowitz partially uncovered pieces meant for the Chicago Exposition, colossal plaster casts and models in clay representing commerce, manufacture, agriculture and the like. They threw enormous shadows on the walls and ceiling.

"You can't get results in art from large figures," said Ritter, though the statues were full of animation, and there was something prepossessing in them.

"Everything for the anniversary of 1492, everything for the Chicago Exposition," said Willy. "A Viking ship is coming over from Norway. The last descendant of Christopher Columbus, a knock-kneed Spaniard, is to be passed around for show, a tremendous humbug, always an acceptable dish to the Americans. Ritter owes this big order to his monkey-like quickness. The building commission applied to various sculptors, and Ritter sent them sketches for all the statues before the other artists had even wet their clay."

"I was working in my little studio in Brooklyn," said Ritter, "and for forty-eight hours in succession I didn't take my hands out of clay. These figures don't bother me in the least. After the Exposition they won't exist except in photographs."

"That's the way the Americans are. Please, Ritter, do give us a Washington memorial. Perhaps you have a Washington memorial ready-made in your waistcoat pocket."

"No, but by eight thirty-five this evening I will have one for you."

"He can do it, too," said Willy, patting his idol. "That is why he fits so well into the United States of America."

The men now entered Ritter's real workshop. Here there were pieces very different in spirit. While the large figures for the Chicago Exposition showed traces of commercialism, here everything was thoroughly artistic. A companion piece in clay to the bas-relief in the club-house, a group of singing girls not yet completed, was standing on a heavy scaffolding. It showed the same noble qualities that Frederick had observed in the relief of the singing boys. Had these works been displayed in Germany, they would undoubtedly have been epoch-making. A bust of an old woman had some of the traits of Donatello. Everything in the room testified to the facility with which the youthful master created. There was a long decorative frieze in clay, putti with goats, dancing fauns, mænads, Silenus on his donkey, a procession of bacchantic figures celebrating the vintage and reproducing all the bacchic joyousness, the drunkenness, of men and women vintagers, as they cut and trod the grapes and drank the wine. Another uncompleted work in clay was the figure of a middle-aged Neptune at a fountain, looking with a jolly smile at a huge fish in his hands. There was a completed plaster cast of St. George, frankly inspired by its glorious model, the St. George of Donatello in the National Museum in Florence. In all these works, Ritter had struck a happy medium between the Greeks and Donatello and created a style fully expressing his own personality, yet showing permissible dependence upon his predecessors.

The pieces in this room were without exception meant for the country residence of an American Croesus, who had taken a tremendous fancy to the young sculptor and his work and jealously tried to keep his creations from straying into another's possession. He looked upon himself as a Medici of the nineteenth century. His marble palace in extensive grounds on Long Island had already swallowed up millions of dollars, though meant as a residence merely for himself, his wife, and his only daughter. No one but Ritter was to do the statuary and sculptural decorations for his house and garden, and he was to have free play. What commissions are given in America! Were talents as easy to create in "our country" as dollars, there would be a second Renaissance even greater than the great Italian Renaissance.

Frederick was fairly intoxicated by the young man's singular good fortune. What he particularly admired was the union of success and merit. When he compared the abundance of these works, tossed off apparently as in play, and the young man's cheerful evenness of temper with his own torn, distracted existence, a feeling came upon him that he had never before had, the feeling that he was an outcast, a feeling of discouragement and helpless defeat. While the light of the candles glided over the creations of the man who had infused form and soul into the formless clay, a voice within him kept saying:

"You have frittered away your existence, you have wasted your days, you will never retrieve your loss."

And the voice of envy, of bitter reproach against a nameless being asked why he had not been permitted to find a similar path and follow it in time.

Ritter's life had received a wrench in Europe. Some brutal mishap while he was serving in the army had made him revolt and later desert. Now, after seven years in America, he was compelled to admit that the wrench had been indispensable for transplanting the sapling to the soil best suited to its growth. In the new surroundings, Ritter's nature developed simply, harmoniously and symmetrically, like a tree with plenty of space and sunlight. Fate atoned for the lack of military subordination in the young prince from genius-land by granting him a surplus of superordination.

Suddenly Ritter said to Frederick:

"I understand Toussaint, the Berlin sculptor, was on board the Roland."

Peter Schmidt had warned the artists in an aside not to touch upon the disaster, telling them his friend was very nervous and a reference to the accident might have a bad effect upon him. But his warning had been forgotten.

"Poor Toussaint," Frederick said, "hoped to find mountains of gold here, though, you may say, he was nothing but a fancy-cake genius."

"And yet I assure you," said Lobkowitz, "there was something grand about him as a man. In spite of his success, he was always poor. He suffered from having a wife who was too fond of society and from having to associate with the persons who bestowed favours upon him and were so much richer than himself. That dandyism of his was not natural. Had he reached America, he would probably have ignored his wife and become an entirely different man. All he wanted to do was to create, to work. What he loved best was to be perched on a scaffolding, with shirt sleeves tucked up, among first-rate workmen. Once he said to me, 'If you should happen to see a mason resembling me in New York, sitting on the pavement eating his lunch and drinking a can of beer, don't hesitate to believe I am that mason, and don't pity me. Congratulate me.'"

"Another one," thought Frederick, "who kept the best part of himself hidden beneath the conventional foppishness of his time; another one who, like me, may always have been trying in vain to reach a definite decision between being and seeming."

Ritter's dog-cart was waiting in front of the door. He suggested that Frederick and Schmidt drive down in it to the railroad station, where Schmidt was to get the train back to Meriden. The two men squeezed in beside the Austrian horse-trainer, valet, or whatever Ritter's coachman was. The trotter went off at a swift gait, and again the wild, noisy phantasmagoria of the streets of the new Babylon went flashing by Frederick's eyes.

Ritter had introduced his coachman as Mr. Boabo. He wore a small round hat of brown felt, brown gloves, and a short brown jockey's overcoat. His chin was heavy, his nose finely chiselled, and his moustache dark and downy. He was a handsome man, or lad, since boyish naïveté still predominated in his expression. He was about the same age as Ritter. While guiding the magnificent grey through the medley of cabs, trucks, and street-cars, he smiled faintly, as if delighted by it all.

Notwithstanding the city's excesses of architecture and engineering, its distinctive characteristic was unimaginativeness. The hurry and bustle, "business," the chase after the dollar had lashed the technical arts on to audacious attempts; for example, the skyscrapers, or the elevated railroad, with its unfenced tracks high overhead, its trains thundering along incessantly in two directions, winding sharply about the corners like an illuminated snake, and writhing into streets so narrow that a person in one of the upper stories of the houses can almost touch the coaches with his hands.

"Madness, lunacy!" Frederick exclaimed in his amazement.

"Not altogether," said Schmidt. "Back of it all is a very sane, unscrupulous practicality, riding down every obstacle in its way."

"It would be hideous were it not so tremendous," Frederick shouted above the din.

The newsboys were still calling the wreck of the Roland.

"What is that? What was that?" thought Frederick. "I am wallowing in life. How does that story concern me?"

A congestion of traffic compelled the grey to come to a halt. He champed on his bit, tossed his head, sending flecks of foam flying from his mouth, and looked about as if to try the heart and reins of the young Austrian officer with his heroic, fiery eyes. During the compulsory pause, Frederick had a chance to observe how sheafs of newspapers were being consumed by the pressing, crushing, jostling throngs.

"The cow gobbles grass, and New York gobbles newspapers," Frederick thought. And heaven be praised! In The World that Schmidt bought of a boy, who at risk of his life had threaded his way to the cart, there were fresh sensations taking precedence of the Roland—"Explosion in a Pennsylvania mine. Three hundred miners cut off." "Fire in a factory in a thirteen-story skyscraper. Four hundred working-girls perish in the flames."

"After us the deluge," said Frederick. "Coal is dear, wheat is dear, oil is dear, but men are cheap as dirt. Mr. Boabo, don't you think our civilisation is a fever of a hundred and six degrees? Isn't New York a mad-house?"

But the handsome youth, after the fashion of Austrian officers, put his hand to his cap with inimitable grace, while a decided smile, a smile of happiness, played about the corners of his mouth, and his answer by no means expressed assent.

"Well, I love life. Here one really lives. When there is no war in Europe, then it is wearisome," he said, speaking in English, which most clearly proved how distant his relation to the old continent was.

At the station, when they were standing on the platform beside the train, Schmidt said to Frederick, wringing his hand impetuously in his German way:

"Now, old fellow, you must soon come to see me in Meriden. Meriden is a small place, and you can recuperate there better than here."

"I'm not altogether a free agent," Frederick replied with a faint, fatalistic smile.

"Why not?"

"I have obligations. I am tied down."

With the indiscretion of intimacy, Schmidt asked:

"Has it anything to do with the wooden Madonna?"

"Perhaps it is something of the sort," Frederick replied. "The poor little thing lost her father, her natural protector, and as I had a share in her rescue—"

"Then there was a girl in a shift, and a rope ladder!"

"Yes and no. I'll tell you more about it some other time. Now just take my word for it, there are times when all of a sudden in a most surprising way, one finds oneself saddled with complete responsibility for a fellow-creature."

Peter Schmidt laughed.

"You mean, if a woman steps up to you in a crowded city street and asks you to hold her baby a moment, and never comes back for her baby?"

"I'll tell you everything some other time."

The train with its long, elegantly built coaches began to move slowly, though no signal of any sort had been given, no whistle or bell or word of command. Without the least to-do, it slipped out of the station wholly disregarded. Peter and Frederick were the only persons taking leave of one another in this crowded train bound inland. Peter mounted the steps, and again shook hands with Frederick.

"I hope to see you soon again," each said to the other warmly.

When Frederick returned home, he learned that a number of reporters and other persons had been there inquiring for him. Webster and Forster's agent had given his address, Frederick deduced upon seeing among the reporters' cards one of Arthur Stoss's. There was also a letter from an impresario, a German of the name of Lehmann, who, failing to find Frederick in, had left a pencilled note asking whether, and under what conditions, Frederick would be prepared to deliver a medical lecture in New York, Boston, Chicago, and later other cities, in which lecture he was each time to touch upon the sinking of the Roland and weave in some of his impressions of the event.

"What else?" thought Frederick, disgusted, though he had to admit that he had actually become famous.

Through Petronilla he sent word to Ingigerd to ask whether it would be agreeable to her to receive him. Petronilla returned with the message that Ingigerd would see him in a quarter of an hour. "Signor Pittore Franck is with her," the housekeeper added; which piece of information sent the blood rushing to Frederick's head; and though it had been his intention to wash and change his clothes, he scarcely waited for Petronilla to conclude her message, and dashed up-stairs three steps at a time. He knocked on Ingigerd's door loudly. No one said "Come in." Nevertheless he opened the door and entered and saw the gypsy painter sitting at Ingigerd's side. On the table under the electric bulbs, lay a large sheet of paper, on which Franck was sketching with a soft pencil what Frederick on stepping nearer saw to be hasty designs for costumes.

"I said in a quarter of an hour," said Ingigerd slowly, making a wry face.

"I'll come whenever I choose to," said Frederick.

Franck, rising without the least air of haste or confusion, greeted Frederick with perfect cordiality and walked to the door.

"I don't want to disturb you. Good evening, Doctor von Kammacher," he said with a grin betraying some delight in Frederick's annoyance.

"Rigo!" Ingigerd called after him. "You promised to come again to-morrow morning."

"What's that boy doing in your room, Ingigerd?" Frederick demanded somewhat roughly, in evident anger. "And 'Rigo'? What does 'Rigo' mean? Are both of you out of your wits?"

Though this tone of his must have been new to her, it seemed agreeable to her, for she said very humbly:

"Well, why did you stay away so long?"

"I'll tell you later. But as matters now stand between us, I forbid your striking up such friendships. If you want to do something for the fellow, present him with a comb and a nail brush and a tooth-brush. Besides, his name isn't Rigo but Max, and he's a seedy sort of chap, absolutely dependent upon his friends."

In his moments of jealousy, it was easy for Ingigerd to put Frederick to shame.

"It makes no difference to me," she said, "whether a man is poor or rich, whether he dresses like a dude or a tramp. Rigo intends to paint my portrait, and I'm looking forward with pleasure to being his model."

"His model? You won't be his model. I'll see to that," said Frederick. "But please explain how you hit upon 'Rigo'? Why do you call him 'Rigo'? Tell me."

"His mother was a gypsy, and when he was a child, some respectable people took him into their family."

"Do you believe that? Franck's friends say he lies every time he opens his mouth."

"I'm not a father confessor. He may lie for all I care."

Frederick did not reply.

Ingigerd was still sitting at the table. With gentle ardour he pressed his lips to her head, loosened the ribbon tying her hair at the nape of her neck, and plunged his fingers deep into the wave of flowing gold.

"Where were you?" the girl asked. Frederick told her of Peter Schmidt and the exhilarating afternoon in Ritter's studio.

"I don't like that sort of thing," she said. "How can people drink wine?"

The thought passed through Frederick's mind that the girl's remarks were rather flat and failed to echo the things he had been telling her.

About an hour later Frederick asked Willy to help him find a boarding house where he and Ingigerd could live, or Ingigerd could live alone without his protection.

"You must realise," Frederick explained, "that no matter how unprejudiced you and your friends may be, it won't do to let a young lady remain permanently in a bachelors' club-house."

Willy did realise the impropriety of the situation; and that very same evening he found an excellent place for her with friends on Fifth Avenue.

The next morning, after the men had left the house, Frederick again fell under the spell of a strange excitement that led him to Ingigerd's room. This time, however, it was not a wave of passion, but a storm of desire for self-purification.

"Ingigerd," he said, "fate has brought us together. I am sure you, too, feel that in spite of all the appalling events we underwent, something like predestination was at work." Frederick now told her, as he had fully planned to do, the story of his past. It was a complete confession. He spoke of his youth and marriage, spoke with all possible forbearance and love of his wife. "There was no hope for her ever getting well again. I have nothing to reproach myself with in regard to her, except that I was a man merely of good intentions and imperfect achievement. But I may not have been the right husband for her in so far as I could not give her the repose of spirit that she needed and I myself lacked. When the collapse finally occurred and other misfortunes—they seldom come singly—and in addition I suffered disappointments outside my family life, I had great difficulty in bearing up. I hate to speak of it, but it is the truth—before I saw you, I picked up a revolver more than once for a very definite purpose. Life weighed upon me like lead. It had turned stale and tasteless. The sight of you, Ingigerd, and, strange to say, the wreck, which I experienced not only symbolically but in actuality, taught me to value life again. You and bare existence—the two things I saved from the wreck. Once more I stand on terra firma. I love the soil. I should like to fondle it. But I am not yet secure, Ingigerd. I am still sore, without and within, you know. You have suffered a loss, I have suffered a loss. We have beheld the other side of existence, the unforgettable gloom. We have looked into the pit. Ingigerd, shall we cling to each other? Will you come to a man torn and distracted, lashed by scorpions, to a man who is greedy to-day and surfeited to-morrow, to a man who longs for peace and repose, and be peace and repose to him? Could you for my sake give up all that has until now filled your life, if I for your sake leave behind me everything that has wasted my existence? Shall we both begin afresh, on a new basis, simply and without any false glamour, and live and die as plain country persons? I will be tender with you, Ingigerd." Frederick hollowed his hands and held them as he had done when speaking of the Madonna. "I will—" He broke off and cried: "Say something! Just tell me the one thing, Ingigerd! Can you—can you become my comrade for life?"

Ingigerd was standing at the window looking out into the fog and tapping the pane with a pencil.

"Perhaps, Doctor von Kammacher," she said finally.

"Perhaps!" Frederick blazed up. "And Doctor von Kammacher!"

Ingigerd turned and said quickly:

"Why do you always fly into such a temper right away? How do I know if I am suited to your needs and desires?"

"It is merely a question of love," replied Frederick.

"I like you. Yes, I do like you, but whether my feeling for you is love, how can I tell? I always say that so far I haven't loved anything but animals."

"Animals!" cried Frederick von Kammacher. He felt mortally ashamed. Never, it seemed to him, in his whole life had he so degraded himself.

A few moments later there was a knock at the door, and a man in a long overcoat and brown kid gloves, carrying a silk hat in his fat hand entered.

"Excuse me," he said, "I presume this is Miss Hahlström?"

"Yes. I am Miss Hahlström."

"My name is Lilienfeld—manager of the Cosmopolitan Theatre." He handed Frederick his card, which announced that he was also manager of a variety theatre and impresario in general. "I obtained your address from Mr. Stoss, the armless marksman, you know. I heard you had had some unpleasantness with Webster and Forster, and I said to myself, I must go and call on the daughter of a good old friend of mine. I knew both your father and mother." Mr. Lilienfeld, in tactfully subdued tones, wound up his rather lengthy address with delicate expressions of sympathy and his personal sorrow at Hahlström's death.

Ingigerd being helpless as a child in business matters, Frederick had taken it upon himself to represent her, and he used the pause in the impresario's speech to put in a word. The man's personality was by no means displeasing to him, and his presence for several reasons was highly welcome.

"Owing to the state of her health, Miss Hahlström was unable until now to appear in public. I as her physician am responsible for her refusal to dance, but Webster and Forster used such rough methods of coercion both through intermediaries and through the mail that Miss Hahlström of her own accord decided in no circumstances to dance under their management."

"Never!" explained Ingigerd. "Absolutely never."

"Besides," Frederick continued, "their terms are miserable. We have received letters offering three and four times as much."

"Exactly what was to be expected," declared Lilienfeld. "Pardon me if I give you a bit of advice. In the first place, be perfectly easy in your mind about Webster and Forster's attempts to intimidate you. For various reasons the contract with Mr. Hahlström is legally invalid. It so happens that I have pretty accurate information regarding the terms of the divorce between your father and mother. They themselves told me, and what is more, my brother was counsel for your father. Your mother was made your legal guardian. Your father had no right to make a contract for you. You ran away. You went with your father because you were devoted to him body and soul and the relation between you and your mother may not have been quite so pleasant. I do not hesitate to say you acted wisely, very wisely. Your father's training has made a great artist of you."

"Thank you," Ingigerd laughed, at the mere memory of her training involuntarily protesting against her artistic education. "For hours at a time, while he sat in a chair comfortably smoking his meerschaum, I had to dance for him without a stitch of clothing on and perform all sorts of contortions and acrobatic feats on a rug. In the afternoon he would play the piano and I would have to go through the same thing all over again."

"Your father was a positive marvel as a trainer. He put two or three international stars on their dancing legs, if you will permit the expression. He was the dancing master of two worlds and"—the impresario laughed significantly—"many other interesting things besides. But to stick to the matter in hand—if you want, your contract with Webster and Forster is null and void." He paused for an instant and began again, this time addressing himself more to Frederick. "I do not deny that I am a business man—always within the limits of gentlemanliness—and I should like to ask you a question, Doctor von Kammacher. Is it your intention to let Miss Hahlström dance at all again, or have you and she decided that she is to retire to private life?"

"Oh, no," said Ingigerd very decidedly.

Frederick felt something like cold iron enter his soul. He seemed to himself to be a sword-swallower unable immediately to extract the steel from his body.

"No, we have not," he, too, said, "though I for my part should like Miss Hahlström to give up the stage because she has a delicate constitution. But she maintains she needs the sensation of it. And when I see the offers she receives, I do not know whether I have the right to persuade her against her will."

"Don't, Doctor von Kammacher, don't!" cried Mr. Lilienfeld. "Miss Hahlström, Doctor von Kammacher, let me take up the cudgels for you against Webster and Forster—bloodsuckers, I tell you—and they've insulted the lady, besides. I assure you, they are the source of a lot of vile rumours about her."

"Mention names," said Frederick, turning white. "I shall have no difficulty, I fancy, in finding a second, and I hope the same code of honour holds for gentlemen here as in Europe."

"Tush—tush!" The impresario lifted his fat hands in pacification, and it seemed to Frederick as if the business man's round head, set low between his shoulders, were trying to make signs to him, as if he were winking his eyes furtively and were suppressing a broad smile, unexpectedly upsetting his business zeal and gravity. "You make entirely too much of it." He looked Frederick straight in the face in a peculiar way with a significant expression in his large round eyes. Then he continued: "For an engagement of twenty evenings in cities to be decided upon, I offer you one hundred and fifty dollars more per evening than anybody else has yet offered you, the engagement to begin inside of four days. If you are agreed, we can go to the lawyer this minute."

Within less than half an hour Frederick and Ingigerd were standing in a huge elevator, which was to take them to the fifth floor of a New York City office building. Ingigerd was the only woman in the elevator, and it pleased her that for her sake the nineteen gentlemen in the car held their hats in their hands.

"If you have never before seen such a thing," Lilienfeld said to Frederick, "the offices of a big American lawyer will astonish you. This is a law firm, two partners, Brown and Samuelson; but Brown's a nincompoop and Samuelson is the whole thing."

The offices of the famous New York lawyer, Samuelson, were partitioned off with wood and ground glass from an immense hall, a writing factory, in which there was a horde of assistants working typewriters. Samuelson made the impression of a man of nearly forty. He was not very tall, had a bad, pallid complexion, and wore a short, pointed beard. The clothes of this man, whose share of the firm's income was estimated at three hundred thousand dollars a year, though of the correct cut, were by no means new; in fact, they were rather shabby, and his entire appearance suggested that he was scarcely a model of American cleanliness. He spoke in a very low, thick voice, as if suffering from a sore throat.

Within less than fifteen minutes, the contract between Lilienfeld and Ingigerd had been concluded, a contract, which owing to the fact that Ingigerd was a minor, was no more valid than the contract with Webster and Forster. Samuelson showed that he was informed of all the details of the case of Hahlström vs. Webster and Forster. When the question of their demands arose, he merely smiled with an air of great disdain and said:

"We will quietly lie low and let them make the advance."

When Ingigerd and Frederick were sitting alone together in a closed cab on the way home, he put his arms about her passionately.

"If you dance on the stage, Ingigerd, I'll go out of my mind. I feel as if you and I and our love would be exposed in the pillory. If it were I instead of you, it would not be half so hard to stand."

The poor young scholar began again to pour out before the little vampire all the anguish he had been suffering, this time with hot kisses and embraces.

"I am a drowning man. If you do not hold your hand out to me I shall sink forever. You are stronger than I am. You can save me. The world is nothing to me. What I lost is nothing, was nothing and will always be nothing to me, if only I can exchange it for you. Come with me, and you shall be all in all to me, the one thing of significance in my life."

"You are not weak," the girl whispered with a dying-away look in her eyes. She breathed heavily, her narrow lips parted, and that fatal, seductive smile spread over her languishing face, like a mask.

"Take me! Run away with me!"

For a time they were silent as the cab rolled along easily on its rubber tires.

"They can wait a long while for you, Ingigerd," Frederick at length said. "To-morrow we shall be with Peter Schmidt in Meriden."

But she laughed. Yes, she laughed at him, and Frederick clearly saw he had melted her body, not her soul; or a soul was a thing this girl did not possess.

The cab came to a halt in front of the club-house. Frederick seemed to have lost his speech. Without saying a word, he escorted Ingigerd to the door, pressed her hand, and returned to the cab. He chose a place at random, and called to the coachman to drive him there.