It was not until the gate was locked behind him that Ordham remembered that in his preoccupation he had forgotten to tell his kutscher to return for him. If any more harrowing climax could have been devised by a vicious fate to crown the unhappiest day of his life than a midnight walk from Schwabing to Barerstrasse—some three miles—his imagination was unable to suggest it. He detested walking at any time, and to-night his throat really was irritated, his head ached a little. Schwabing showed not a point of light; it might have been the Alpine village it so picturesquely resembled. There was a long highway between fields to traverse before reaching the Ludwigstrasse, and even there he might not pick up a cab. The stately shell of Munich and most of her contents were practically dead at ten o’clock.

A sharp wind was blowing from the Alps across the high plateau. Ordham pulled up the collar of his light overcoat and walked more briskly than was his habit. Illness might be convenient as an excuse, but as a fact was little to his taste; although he realized that it was not the worst evil that could befall him at present.

For perhaps the first time in his life something deeper than his temper was agitated. He could always stamp about in a fine rage when annoyed, but he had had little occasion to rail at a perverse fate. Now he found himself face to face with a distinct crisis in his life—the probability of disaster just beyond. He had heard Frau von Wass talk wildly before, but other women talked wildly and nothing came of it. They seemed rather to enjoy their little dramas than otherwise. He regarded them all as interesting books—or plays—which he was graciously permitted to read at first hand. But his own attitude had always been nearly impersonal. When he had closed the book clept “Frau von Wass,” he had, in the insolence and inexperience of his youth, taken for granted that it would accumulate dust in limbo with all of its kind. He had been as much astonished as annoyed at the turn affairs had taken, but not apprehensive until to-day. That Hélène Wass was in desperate earnest he could no longer flatter himself by doubting. He reviewed his own share in the incident; and while he was amazed that such a price should be levied for what had been little more than politeness on his part, still was he far too intelligent not to remind himself that men had paid as high for less, and too just not to admit that it had been in his power to nip the woman’s passion in the bud.

Although he was puzzled as well as frightened at this encounter with the grim visage of life, whose gloomy unsympathetic eyes presaged defeat, he was sullenly angry with himself. If he had loved the woman or even been possessed, no matter how briefly, by one of those overwhelming passions of which he was always reading and hearing, he felt that he would have accepted the consequences without flinching. But as it was, he felt like a foolish mariner who had gone to sea without a compass and found himself justly on the rocks. Unless the unexpected happened, it looked as if he would be swept out of Munich with the rest of the Frau Geheimrath’s wreckage and landed high and dry in Italy.

Suddenly another ugly phase of this crisis in his life leapt to his mind, and he passed through the arch of the Siegesthor with such a stride that the British Minister, returning from a late card party, did not recognize him and went on without offering the hospitality of his coupé.

Normally there was a faint hope that Bridgminster would once more pay his debts, those distressing tradesmen’s bills of which he was reminded daily. His tailor’s was but one, and the aggregate must be close upon a thousand pounds. But if he openly committed the sin with which his austere brother had the least sympathy, he would be driven into the bankruptcy court. That would be a disgrace which would blast his self-respect to the roots, even did England, never lenient to this offence, forget it in time. There is a secret tendency in most human hearts to forgive a lover his worst transgressions, but no sympathy whatever for the financial muddler. And such a thing was unheard of in his family, whatever its lapses in other directions. It was bred in his very marrow to shrink with fastidious disgust from any form of monetary publicity. To owe money to tradespeople did not worry him in the least so long as they were sensible and patient, but there was ineffable disgrace in being blazoned to the world as a man hopelessly in debt.

It was at this agonizing point in his reflections that his attention was attracted by the peculiar antics of a dog emerging from the Schellingstrasse. It had dropped something and was howling, grovelling in evident appeal at the feet of a woman who soundly berated it. The woman stamped her huge foot and pointed to the object the dog had dropped. Howling and yelping an almost human protest, the dog picked up the object and ran past Ordham into the Ludwigstrasse, then discarded his burden once more, sat down on his haunches, and lifted up his voice in a series of cries that sounded like an appeal to the winking stars.

Ordham, his curiosity excited, went forward, and bending down, examined the object of the dog’s aversion. It was a block of ice. The poor beast was howling with a toothache. Ordham looked at the woman as much in amazement as in anger. She could have carried the ice in her skirt; it was inconceivable to him that any one could maltreat a dog. But as he opened his mouth to relieve his indignation, he realized that any attempt to penetrate the thick Bavarian skull with his inadequate German would be a mere waste of time. He picked up the piece of ice and dropped it into the pocket of his overcoat.

“If you will lead the way,” he said, “I will carry it for you.”

The astonished housewife stared in amazement, ejaculated “Ach Gott!” then, with a laugh of deep good-natured contempt, led off with a swing that exhibited the tops of her man’s boots, the red blanket petticoat above them, and the full flounces of her pantalets. She was almost as broad as long, her waist line being in no place distinguishable from the solid expanses above and below. Her skirts were short; she wore a shawl crossed over her upper amplitudes and pinned behind. A small Tyrolean hat sat jauntily above a walnut of plastered hair. She was a street sweeper, inured to every sort of hardship, and not likely to sympathize with a dog’s aching teeth. But no doubt she fed him as well as she could afford.

The strange procession made its way up the stately Ludwigstrasse, deserted but for the sentries before a palace. Once or twice Ordham, contemplating his guide, who swung like a vast pendulum, laughed silently. The grateful dog flew up and down, or frisked about his heels in an ecstasy of relief. At the Odeonsplatz were two belated cabs. Ordham handed into one the woman, the dog, and the ice, paid the driver, and sank into the other with a sigh of gratitude, not only for the more familiar mode of locomotion, but for the temporary diversion afforded by a dog with a toothache! For a few moments he had forgotten his bills and Frau von Wass. When he reached the Legation his throat was very sore, and fortune so far favoured him that on the following day he really was laid up with bronchitis. His servant took a verbal message to the Frau Geheimrath, which, after sharp questioning, she was forced to accept.

On this same morning there was a brief but pithy interview between Styr and Excellenz in the very centre of the Nachmeister gardens.

“So! so!” exclaimed the old woman; her grey eyes glittered like ice, the corners of her mouth were down, of her nose up. “It comes to this! Poor Fritz! We can save the young man if we are quick enough, but what of my poor old friend? . . . Ach, yes! You are not interested. He is old. You—yourself—look full of insolent youth this morning. I have never seen you in this mood. Cultivate it. You look twenty-eight. Myself, were I your age, should prefer to look more like a woman than a goddess. Also! Fritz must suffer in any case, so all we can do is to save the young man and spare the old one a lesion. Fritz is the vainest man in Germany or he would have found her out long since. He remains in Berlin ten days. You think she intends to make Mr. Ordham elope with her before his return. I wonder! Gott! I fancy it would take more than ten days to work our young friend up to that heroic pitch. More likely she has planned a coup of some sort. Otherwise—I doubt. He will politely promise to meet her at the train. At the last moment he will send a message—but in haste! ‘I am so sorry! I can’t go to-day. I have a cold.’ I know all the ingenious devices of that charming youth, and so, I doubt not, does Frau Hélène. He has not eaten of the big black cake of life yet, merely nibbled at its edges.”

“He is likely to choke on a slice unless we are quick enough.”

“True. Also! I repeat, she must know all his little ways by this time, have discovered that he is by no means as ingenuous as he looks, nor as easy to manage. She moves and lives in a network, a very maze, of intrigue. Only the devious ways appeal to her. You may be sure she has some plot on foot which the sudden departure of Fritz disarranged. That would account for her excitement that same afternoon. I have watched this little drama from the first, but she seems to have been playing a deeper game than I fancied—and different! I have watched many of her little dramas in the last twenty years. Of late it would seem that she had been lulling the suspicions of our young friend while she laid her wires. But what and where are those wires? There is only one way to find out and that is through her maid.”

“I thought of that, of course; but none of my servants know any of the Wass household.”

“Nor mine, probably. But I do my scheming through no such dangerous channels. The secret police is always at my service. By to-morrow night I shall have had an interview with the woman. If she has anything to reveal I shall extract it with the promise of a position in the Residenz; that is a bribe more potent than gold—which we will not use unless we must. As soon as I am in possession of the facts I shall act—you say he has vowed to do nothing rash for a week?”

“To be ill, if necessary. Fortunately she cannot storm the Legation.”

“Even so, we must act quickly. If the woman is really desperate, she will find some way to compromise him—and what more effective than a violent scene in the British Legation? It would be all over Munich in an hour. But, by all the saints,” Nachmeister crossed herself devoutly, “that scene she shall never make. We will baffle her before she has quite lost her patience.”

When Excellenz had bidden good-by to her guest she stood for a moment regarding the path with drawn brows. Had she engaged upon an enterprise to deliver the lamb from the panther to the tigress? In a moment she shook her head. She was a very wise old woman, and she recalled that Styr had made no apologies, no explanations. She had said nothing about disinterested friendship, taking a natural interest in a man so much younger than herself. Nachmeister had long outlived the folly of generalizing, of assuming that the same set of motives must govern the most diverse individuals. For the present, at least, Ordham was in no danger from the prima donna, who, no doubt, had lived her life, and would hardly waste her time playing upon the weakness of young men.

“But if I should be mistaken,” she thought grimly, “she too can be circumvented. Ordham must marry Mabel Cutting.”

Two days later Styr stood in the tower of her living room, awaiting Excellenz, who had sent her a succession of hasty notes. As always, when the river was full, she had the sensation of floating on the current of the lovely light green waters. The birds were singing in her garden and in the deep glades of the park. The Isar itself sang of the glaciers and snow peaks that gave it birth. From the fields, beyond the heavy trees, came the dainty uplifting scent of newly mown hay. Usually this scene of sylvan isolation fed the poetry of her secret life, and in these morning hours, when the park was deserted, she might people it with satyrs and dryads, even with Valkyrs, if she wished. But to-day it seemed only the romantic annex to the exciting drama into which she had precipitated herself; and it required but a slight effort to conjure up the gorgeously dressed little butterfly with her ugly old soul in her desperate face, and the perplexed, doubtless terrified, young man, dragging his feet beside her.

Styr was by no means in a philosophic frame of mind. She fully realized that this license in which she had indulged for the first time in many years, this luxury of active interest in a human being, other than a student or a chorus girl in distress, would lead far—unless she promptly locked the gates again. Already her brain was showing a disposition to offer hospitality to more than one of the great interests with which the world palpitated. Yesterday she had been on the point of buying a newspaper. If Ordham continued to call, they would inevitably discuss all interests under the sun; books alone would never occupy them; one by one the atrophies in her uncommonly complete nature would disintegrate, disappear. And she had lived the inner life so completely, so jealously, almost as isolated in her villa by the Isar as had it been one of those schlosses on its lonely peak that decorate the German landscape! That sense of unviolated liberty! It had at times lifted her spirit to that exalted pitch to which music raises the emotional capacity of speech. There are more forms of happiness than one in this world, and Margarethe Styr had solved the greatest problem of woman’s existence: she was quite happy, and not because she had found the man of her heart, but because she had eliminated man from her existence altogether. Whether Nature, that inexorable slave-driver, would have permitted her to dwell in peace with art and her soul had not circumstances first made all men hateful to her, was beside the question. But although she had found happiness, it was at the expense of far more than the one dream to which most women cling until the last of their days. She had denied her mind much that it naturally craved, and she had suppressed those superficial frivolous instincts which have their own appetites. She often longed to dress (and show herself), in marvellous Paris frocks, and, never before having known women with whom she cared to associate (save briefly on Atlantic steamers), she would have derived much honest enjoyment from long gossips with these friendly sophisticated women of Munich; she would have liked to know and discuss all the little comedies, tragedies, diverting weaknesses, in the lives of her new compatriots. But she had not dared, and the results she had achieved by her fidelity to the life long since prescribed by her too enlightened brain, encouraged her to persist. She half resolved that, having done her obvious duty by a fellow-creature, she would withdraw from further intercourse with him at once. Better snap this link while her surfaces were merely rippled, not drift on until all that was feminine in her was caught in the net of the world again, and this ideal existence destroyed.

It was at this point in her meditations that Princess Nachmeister was shown into the gallery, and she went hastily through the arch to meet her.

“What a picture!” exclaimed Excellenz politely, although, indeed, she had long since reached the age when she could candidly enjoy feminine loveliness. “Fancy being able to wear unrelieved white in the morning! How do you like my new Paris frock? My maid says that the overskirt has too many pleats on the hips, but for my bones, I think not.”

Princess Nachmeister looked very smart in a costume of dark brown camel’s-hair and silk and a little bonnet of brown leaves, but Countess Tann gave it but a perfunctory glance, and Excellenz herself was too excited to demand more.

“Fritz arrives to-night and comes directly to me!” she announced. “I telegraphed yesterday afternoon that I must see him at once upon a business so important that he was not to waste time imagining it, but to come. He replied that he would leave Berlin this morning. Lotte made a sworn statement, and has obtained leave to visit her sick mother for two days in order to be out of the way of Hélène’s claws when the bolt falls. She is locked up in my house; but I do not wish her to see Fritz, lest his questions should lead to other revelations that would induce even him to sue for a divorce. And that would leave Hélène free to practise on the susceptibilities of our jüngling. No, I shall convince him—and present the subject in such a way that he may escape apoplexy. Three days hence Frau Hélène will be locked up in that castle in Hungary in good old mediæval style. I know my Fritz. His heart will never trouble him again until it develops fatty degeneration; but in his outraged vanity he will roar like a bull, he will be vicious, relentless, and in the confusion of his mind will follow blindly every suggestion I make. How he will hate her, and how he will make her pay! He will give out that he retires to Hungary for his health, taking, of course, his dutiful wife. Later, official matters recall him, but the Frau Geheimrath is afflicted with a goitre and desires to remain in seclusion. The season over, nobody thinks of her in any case. Oh, La Belle Hélène is disposed of, and our charming young friend is free to get himself into another scrape.”

“Not for some time, I fancy. He has had his lesson and is by no means a human caldron. He will not suspect that she has been shut up on his account. A young Englishman’s chivalry must be reckoned with—”

“Whatever he may suspect, he will discover nothing. Fritz will whisk her out of Munich to-night. From Hungary he will compel her to write Ordham a commonplace letter that will set him quite free.”

“Heavens, how old-fashioned and romantic you still are over here! The United States might be on another planet. But there is law for women in Europe. Will she not appeal to it? She has money of her own. Will she not escape from his castle and flee to her villa in Italy?”

“In theory, but not in fact. Fritz will not be made ridiculous in the eyes of Europe, no, not if he has to pour hot lead into her ear. But a threat of extinction and the hope of his speedy demise will keep her quiet, to say nothing of the fact that she will never escape from that castle. It is in the mountains near the Roumanian border. His servants are the wild creatures of that region, and will obey their master, not only because he is their master, but a mighty sportsman, and they revere that. I have visited there. What a romantic spot for a honeymoon! But as a prison—Ach Gott! She will never even get a letter out. When she has calmed down she will affect compliance, and take care of her complexion till Fritz dies. Then she will run to Paris, where she will be very smart and very wicked until she is fifty, when she will take to opium, religion, or roulette—all three, no doubt. But ach, dear Gräfin, what a tableau we shall miss in imagination! I could regret it, for I had every detail from Lotte. Mr. Ordham, with blank rigid face supporting the hysterical Hélène in the Pompadour boudoir, bored, vaguely apprehensive. Enter Lotte, followed by Fritz in his dressing-gown and nightcap. I am convinced he wears a mustard-yellow flannel dressing-gown like the one in which Salvini strangles Desdemona! Behind them the other servants, that the matter cannot be hushed up. It was a clever and a dramatic plot! It is almost a pity that it should not make its chapter in the unwritten history of society. And Gott! Gott! Fancy being still able to love like that! It makes one almost envious. It is the last love that makes a fool of the woman, and the first love that makes a man look as foolish as he is.”

“I suppose something interesting is happening every moment in your world?” said Styr, somewhat wistfully.

“All those little dramas are more or less alike. Only you are original, dear Gräfin, and do, for the sake of this tired old brain, remain so. If ever you succumb to your sex, I shall curse you. You are a great artist in histrionics, but I am a little artist in Life, and quite as exacting. Pay me fifty marks. I had to give that voracious Lotte a hundred, besides the promise of a position in the Residenz.”

For two days Ordham was really ill, or at least so uncomfortable that his mind was quite averted from his evil fortunes. But with the quick submission of his ailment to treatment alarm bells began to ring in his brain once more. He wasted no time, however, cursing fate and his folly, neither did he make any effort to consign their achievements to one of those water-tight compartments of which he was so proud. He set his wits to work and finally hit upon a compromise which promised to save both his honour and his credit. Immediately upon his recovery he would go to England, and by hook or crook get his debts paid. He would appeal to Bridgminster first; finding him obdurate, he would confide his predicament to his mother, and he well knew that to avert a scandal she would raise the money if she had to sell her jewels or beg of her relatives. Meanwhile he should have written to Frau von Wass, very formally,—when had he ever written to her otherwise?—assuring her that he should return to Munich within the month. If she followed him, she could be kept out of sight in London. Otherwise, he might venture to hope that before his return her common sense would have revived. If not, he supposed he should be an ass, as other men had been before him; but while his chances for the diplomatic career would be ruined, his credit would be immaculate in the eyes of his world, and that would almost console him.

As it was prudent to receive no visitors and as he was in no mood for the fiction of other minds, he arrayed one of his tables with certain books presented to him by his father long since, and whose contents he must master before presenting himself before the Civil Service Commission: histories of Europe, Asia, and America covering the period between 1789 and 1880; Blackstone’s Commentaries, Ker’s edition, 1862; Hallam’s Constitutional History of England; Mill’s Political Economy; Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Before now, when ill or annoyed, he had taken refuge in this austere masonry, and had found its fascinations quite as powerful for the time as the jewelled streets of literature where the creative minds displayed their wares. Sometimes, too, he read them when mortified with the knowledge that he had not “played up,” “risen to the occasion,” as an older man still gambling with edged tools would have done; a manifestation of the quickness and assimilative qualities of his intellect salved his wounded vanity and induced a temporary scorn of youthful follies. But, truth to tell, it is not likely that he would have opened one of these books for ten years to come could he have passed his examinations without their aid.

During the six days of his convalescence he read steadily, and if the severe diet did not elevate his spirits, it diverted his mind. From the third day of his incarceration he wrote Frau von Wass a series of pleasant little notes to keep her quiet, and, receiving no answer, inferred that she was sulking. As she crossed her letters (she never wrote him notes), he was thankful for the additional respite until the eighth day of his seclusion; then he began to feel uneasy and to wonder if she really meditated an attack on the Legation. He was on the point of cutting his convalescence short and hastening to London, when he was astounded to receive the following note from Hungary:

Then for the first time did Ordham fairly appreciate the load that had weighed his spirits to earth, delaying his recovery, driving him to pound his brain into a state of stupefaction before night. In a moment he felt entirely well. Flinging his dressing-gown off and Blackstone into a corner, he began to dress hastily that he might go out of doors, take a drive, call on Countess Tann. He even felt an affectionate impulse toward Princess Nachmeister and other friends that had given much and asked little. He whistled, wondering that he had ever lost faith in his star; he felt young,—“but young!” as these foreigners would say, gay, insolent. His imagination took leaps and bounds: he saw himself an ambassador; Bridg long since retired from a world in which he had no place, leaving behind him an income which delivered his illustrious heir from the fatiguing obligation of marrying one; returning to Munich every year to hear Styr sing, and to sit for hours in that delightful gallery—no doubt in time she would let him lie on the divan while she sat in that odd American rocking-chair looking like a friendly goddess—

But his jubilance came to a violent halt. His mind had tossed up mechanically her avowed intention to save him. He had not given it a second thought, so manifest was her inability to play any part in this intensely personal crisis of his life. He recalled her eager insistence that he grant her a week, the strength that had pulled him toward her like a magnet, remembered that she had attempted greater things than foiling a silly woman and failed in none of them.

The blood mounted to his hair, he pressed his lips together until their soft boyish curves were obliterated. A wave of shame, anger, rebellion, rose and choked him.

In a few moments it receded, left him quite cold. He was a wise young man, in spite of follies. Whatever had been done—assuming that vivacious note from Hungary to have been written under coercion—had been carried to a finish. The episode was over. Frau von Wass announced that fact herself. If mystery were here, it were a mystery best unsolved. A water-tight compartment opened, closed. He refused even to harbour a natural curiosity.

He returned to the pleasant occupation of arraying himself, one in which he still took as much pleasure as any girl. Hines, his man, was ill, but he was too happy to resent the trifling exertion involved in a lonely toilet. It was a brilliant morning in late spring and he selected socks, necktie, and handkerchief of a delicate sage green, and a dull grey suit cut in a fashion that often tempted even the officers to turn and look at him. Much to his chagrin, no part of his morning was ever wasted at the barber’s. When he played tennis he exposed an arm with a proper filamentous surface, and on the top of his head his hair, a light burnished brown, grew as thickly as sprouting corn; but never a blade had appeared on his face. For this he should have been grateful, as his chief claim to regular beauty was the perfect oval of his face and the clean yet rounded outline of the long jaw; but he yearned for a beard to shave as a girl yearns for her first adorer to maltreat.

He finished his toilet in the course of time, sauntered out of the Legation, and, entering the cab that had awaited him forty minutes, concluded to drive for an hour, as it was too early to call. The kutscher, whose vast expanse looked as if about to burst through its rusty old livery, hunched down into himself after the fashion of his kind, and, with his high battered hat tilted on one side of his red face, his eyes half closed, and apparently in momentary danger of rolling from his perch, gave the Munich droschke that final touch of style which is the despair of Paris and Berlin.

But he drove his fare safely and slowly about a city, which after a week’s tormented seclusion seemed quite the most beautiful in the world. The stately Renaissance capital with its Gothic corners; its old palaces and modern public buildings, the former severe, the new ornate but dignified and magnificent: its churches representing the vagaries of all architectures; its oblongs and squares of green, set with statues of public men and gushing fountains—torrents of sparkling water as free and crystal as Alpine torrents; its classic Königplatz, as severe and beautiful as Rome in the days of the Cæsars; its superb statues to the Bavarian rulers that had transformed a mediæval stronghold into the most artistic city in Europe; its innumerable terraces for beer drinking and coffee; its winding river of many branches and massive bridges, poetical name, and strange colour like melted ice reflecting pale green jewels; and then the fields and woods, the stately drives and winding ways, of the Englischergarten, where naught of Munich save its irregular but fine and soaring sky-line can be seen,—all go to the making of a city whose like is to be found nowhere on earth, and in which one can linger longest alone.

The Ludwigstrasse, one of the most imposing streets in Europe, lined from end to end with the high flat façades of the Italian Renaissance, starts from the Feldherrnhalle, a copy of the famous Loggia in Florence, and terminates far down in the perspective with the Siegesthor, a triumphal arch in the fashion of Constantine’s, but surmounted by a colossal “Bavaria” driving her lions in the direction of Prussia!

As Ordham’s cab turned into this street to-day, he found it crowded with people, for it was one of those saints’ days, so numerous in the Bavarian calendar, when every Münchener closes his shop, and, if the weather be fine, walks the streets and fills the churches and cafés with his brood. The students too were celebrating, either the saint or some private deity of their own, for open fiakers were full of them: blue caps, green caps, red caps, according to their clubs, but all with the same slashed faces, the same supreme approval of themselves and the institution of universities, which gave so many of them their only chance in life to play. Here and there among the throng were the more impressive figures of officials in brass headgear and gala uniform, white or the dazzling light Bavarian blue. Royal blue carriages, with coachmen and footmen in blue and white livery, were leaving the Residenz gardens, evidently bound for a family reunion at another palace. Everywhere was life, movement, gayety, except, to be sure, in the figures of the sentries standing before the palaces. These were as wooden as only a German soldier on duty can be, but, although they looked as stupid as no doubt they were, their eyes followed the throng.

Overhead, in the rich blue sky (the royal shade!) hung those low soft foam-white masses of clouds composed by Nature for Bavaria alone; the air was warm and light; not a breeze brought down the chill of Alpine snows; although from highest windows the sharp tumbling crowded peaks might be seen glittering through the haze that promised fine weather.

Ordham, as happy as if care had never approached him, lounged in the corner of his uncomfortable droschke and wondered why people went to Italy: here there was so much of Italy, so much more besides. The old Saxon at the base of his centuplicated self always stirred amiably at the sight of the good-natured German crowd (unless it jostled him), and nowhere was that crowd so good-natured as in Bavaria. It was too accustomed to its liberal allowance of daily beer ever to overdrink or crave the excitement of spirits; and although the students occasionally took pride in spurring on their seasoned constitutions to a point which enabled them to sing in the streets all night, even they found it too much of an effort, and transgressed but seldom. It is only the American student in these German universities and art schools who, unfamiliar in his home with alcohol in any form, often becomes a sot; and is a despicable object to behold, where the European is merely absurd.

There was scarcely a factory in the neighbourhood of Munich, little business outside of its shops, which opened late and closed early, no poverty, a prevailing belief that life was made to enjoy, not to take with the fatiguing seriousness of northern climes. The Bavarian understands Italy far better than he will ever understand Prussia.

Ordham, driving slowly through this slowly moving, smiling throng, bent only upon innocent enjoyment, wondered a little that it should practically be the first to welcome all that was distempered in the arts of literature, music, painting, and the drama (those temporary but recurring aberrations, which, in the present instance, were ripening to produce the gifted but dislocated brains of Richard Strauss, Wedekind, and the ultra Secessionists). A people that were happy and simple by nature, yet capable of appreciating Wagner when encouraged by their King, might be expected to turn from this sufficient intoxication of their mental senses to the relief of plays and romances that were either serious in the good old style or merely frolicsome. But the plays presented in the theatres of Munich were enough to make Paris nervously try on her bays; and the greater and more accomplished city had never dreamed of exhibiting in the shop windows of her fashionable streets covers of books so ingenuously shameless. To shock a Münchener, the most domesticated, virtuous, bourgeois, must always have been as difficult as to persuade some Americans that human nature is made up of inconsistencies; but Ordham, at least, had never been more interested in watching the stolid children at a Spanish bull-fight, than these good, homely, soft-waisted people of Bavaria relishing the indecencies of their stage, their expression much the same as when they sat with their elbows on a table in a restaurant and devoured a dinner lasting two hours without raising their eyes. That the lower class of Bavaria was one of the most unmoral in the world, the percentage of illegitimacy being inordinately high, was beside the question, as this was not the class that filled the theatres and bought the paper-covered novels. It was not even the court society that kept the theatres open, for social diversions were many, even if no longer as brilliant as formerly: the theatres then as now were filled night after night with the phlegmatic exemplary bourgeoisie, all of whom ambled home at the end of a performance designed to spare what imaginations they possessed, supped on sausage, black bread, and beer, and snored in stuffy ugly rooms without a dream.

Perhaps this echo of domestic rhythm explains all.

But Ordham soon dismissed the shortcomings of a city he hoped to revisit many times in the course of his life. A crowd of peasants trooped through the Siegesthor, which he was leisurely approaching on his way to the villa of Countess Tann. They had come down from their village in the Bavarian Alps to assist in the festivities of Schwabing, and were now bound for one of the humbler cafés of the city. They were in gala attire; the women homely, shapeless, sunburnt, their plastered hair surmounted by a flat round hat that looked like a lid, and probably represented Fashion making her first essay in headgear; the thick full skirt swayed as if hooped, its ugliness offset, however, by the short-waisted white bodice over which was laced a silk or velvet corselet, much decorated with silver chains, buttons, brooches, filigree, and seed pearls. The short skirts revealed large flat feet made conspicuous by their proud owners with white open-work stockings, and low shoes fitted with tassels, bows, and silver buckles. The men were straighter, better set up, improved by their coats of tan. They wore short black leather trousers embroidered with green, lively waistcoats, white shirts, black velvet jackets embroidered with green, and almost as much silver as the women. Their thick knitted stockings of grey and green exposed both knee and ankle, and all wore the little green Alpine hat with its eagle’s feather, and smoked a pipe a yard long with a painted bowl. On the whole they were vastly more attractive than the average young Münchener with his high collar, red face, tight and ill-cut Sunday clothes.

Suddenly, far down the Leopoldstrasse, which continues the Ludwigstrasse beyond the arch, appeared a cloud of dust. From it emerged mounted police. They galloped down the highway, waving the crowds to the pavements, the vehicles to the very curbs. This could mean but one phenomenon, and although Ordham coloured with annoyance at being swept aside with the rabble, he stood up in his cab to obtain a better view. A moment later, escorted by a cavalry guard in brilliant uniforms, a carriage became visible, its six horses galloping as if pursued by the furies of hell. Ordham held his breath, expecting an accident in the tunnel of the Siegesthor, but the carriage shot through without swerving a hair’s breadth; and as Ludwig stood suddenly upright, all that vast concourse, that now so rarely saw their King, set up a shout that made even the old cab horses start and paw the ground.

“Heil! Heil! Unserem König, Heil! Hoch Ludwig! Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!”

A flush rose to the heavy pallid face of the King, and his beautiful restless eyes sparkled, he smiled graciously. But he was always the conscious actor, and as the carriage flew up the street, as if the horses indeed were winged, he stood with his arms folded, his head high, as if already on a pedestal instead of in a bounding vehicle. Little wonder the Bavarians adored a monarch ever able to furnish them with impromptu theatricals. They cheered and yelled, waved hats, parasols, and handkerchiefs, until the Englishman felt the blood racing in his own veins. No doubt it raced in the King’s. The hearts of the Bavarians never wavered in their loyalty to this romanticist, who to the last had something of the immortal gods in his make-up. Had he shown himself spectacularly during those fatal days when arrest impended, but while escape from Neuschwanstein was still possible, his capital would have flocked to his standard and intimidated the ministry. But Ludwig had cultivated the tragic attitude too long.

The King vanished almost as quickly as he had come. Ordham’s cab ambled on its way: through the Siegesthor, along the still half-rustic Leopoldstrasse, and into the village of Schwabing. Here the narrow zigzag streets, the rural lanes, the riverside, the little beer gardens, were as thronged as the city, while opposite, in the Englischergarten, there were glimpses of another crowd which completed the impression that every house in Munich must be deserted.

Few villages in the high Alps are more picturesque than Schwabing, which still has its old mill, and the tower of whose white church, perched high, swells into one of those graceful spheres that form links in an invisible chain through the blue of Bavaria, Austria, and Hungary to the land of the Turk. About the church were many graves; and a few old women in black, hatless, bent, were praying there.

Countess Tann’s house faced a street so narrow that had not her walls been high and her opposite neighbour’s abode humble she would have been forced to keep her curtains drawn. It was on the very edge of the village, and her garden extended along the highway beyond. There were few flowers in the garden, for Bavaria is not the land of flowers, but there were many trees; and wide gates at the back could be rolled apart to frame a picture of the Isar and the Englischergarten.

The front gate was of wrought iron and afforded glimpses of the secluded little park and of the villa’s ornate façade. Ordham rang the bell several times before the old butler sauntered out, half asleep, and informed the impatient visitor that the Frau Gräfin was driving, but had left instructions to admit Mein Herr, should he call and be disposed to wait.

Ordham sent his kutscher to a near-by beer garden and followed the servant to the gallery. He declined coffee until the return of the hostess, and old Kurt opened a box of cigarettes and departed to ponder upon the marvel of a young man in the house. The maids were gallivanting or there would have been high discussion.

Ordham realized that he was a little tired, but before making himself comfortable with a book, strolled into the tower to listen for a moment to the band playing in the pagoda of the Englischergarten, and picture the numberless tables, amongst which trudged unceasingly big perspiring Bavarian maidens, carrying mugs of foaming beer to an ever thirsty people. But his eye was immediately attracted to the books on the shelves which covered the walls of the tower, and he scanned them eagerly. He was astonished to find that the collection was almost wholly scientific. Bastian, David Strauss, Johannes Müller, Virchow, Descartes, Goethe, Baer, Lamarck, Paul Holbach, Du Bois-Reymond, Harvey, Heinrich Hertz, Bacon, Aristotle, Darwin, Spencer, Alexander Humboldt, the Vogts, Lavoisier, Spinoza, Cuvier, were a few of the names in this catholic assemblage, which had its representative in every branch of science, using the word in its broad sense. Ordham ceased to wonder that the great Styr had been able to extinguish her merely feminine ego. With such meat for daily sustenance, and the strong wine of art, the wonder was that she had not developed into a new species. The only works of fiction were the novels of Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert, and On the Heights. Other shelves were filled with volumes devoted to the analysis of music and the lives and letters of composers.

He returned to the gallery with a volume of Illusions Perdues, and looked longingly at the divan, but compromised upon the deepest of the chairs. He would have liked to smoke, but he was far too formal both by nature and training to make himself at home at this early stage of his acquaintance with Countess Tann. His eyes roved over the gallery with much curiosity. It was the first time he had known a woman that worked for her living, and he appreciated that this room, full of beautiful and interesting objects as it was, had an entirely different atmosphere from the boudoirs of the fine ladies of the world. There was a certain austerity about it, rather an absence of the luxury, frivolity, soft magnificence, of the personal nests of women that neither knew nor cared how their wants were gratified. Even the carved old chairs looked comfortable, but it was not the room of a woman who lounged, but who worked, studied, thought. To Ordham it was more personal than any woman’s room he had ever seen; then he suddenly realized that it was its component of masculinity which had enveloped him at once like an emanation from his own spirit.

Half an hour later he opened his eyes to behold a tall figure in a long grey cloak smiling before him. He rose with a deep blush and stammered apologies. “Is it possible—will you ever forgive me?”

“Why not, Herr Invalide? I will go and change my frock, and then we will have coffee. Just a moment.”

She reached the door, then, as if suddenly assailed by an anxious memory, turned and said hesitatingly: “I have felt so worried—it was such a relief to hear that you were really ill—and to-day you look so much less careworn, almost happy—”

“I am quite happy—thanks so much. Please don’t bother—how good of you! The lady thought better of it, as I might have known she would,—has thrown me over, in fact.”

“Delightful! I was at my wit’s end. Now we shall keep you in Munich. Do sit down again.”

She returned dressed in a white organdie frock sprigged with violets. It was flounced and full, the bodice crossed by a Marie Antoinette fichu tied loosely at the back, and in her hair she had twisted a lavender ribbon. She looked as if she had merely adapted herself to the warm afternoon, not in the least coquettish or alluring. How could she, thought Ordham, with that library behind her?

“Such a drive as I have taken!” she exclaimed as she seated herself before the coffee service old Kurt had brought in. “Down into the Isarthal and far beyond Castle Grünwald. It was delightful in the woods, or would have been without the crowds. You will go there with me some day, I hope?”

“I will go with you anywhere.”

“That would mean long walks instead of sleeping until nine o’clock—eleven, I am told, it used to be.”

“But everybody will be leaving Munich soon and I shall not be sitting up so late. Do take me with you—at any hour.”

“But you will be following—not? They will all ask you to visit them. Poor German!”

He hesitated. “Shall you stay here?”

“I seldom go away except for a few days at a time, for I no longer sing in Bayreuth; Frau Cosima and I do not agree on the subject of Brünhilde, whom I interpret for myself. Moreover the King has often private representations in the Hof. It is as well, for I am never so happy as in Munich, and Bayreuth is not the same to me now that The Master is gone. Late in August and in September I must go on my Gastspiel—concert engagements in several German cities and in Vienna—but that is all; I never visit.”

“I think I should remain here all summer and study with Fräulein Lutz. I should like to pass my examinations this year. But perhaps Fräulein Lutz takes a vacation?”

“I will see that she does not. Yes—stay and study. It is so fatally easy when one is young and heedless to be caught in the maelstrom of insignificance; and two years—what are they? You have the rest of your life to visit country houses.”

“You have a way of phrasing truths that makes it quite impossible to forget them.” He spoke dryly, but his face had flushed. “ ‘Caught in the maelstrom of insignificance.’ I shall stay here and alternate the delights of Adam Smith with Fräulein Lutz, burn my candle over Blackstone and Hallam, when I might be sneezing in some draughty castle or accumulating typhoid germs. That is to say, if you will let me walk with you—and come here often. My virtues, at least, need admiration and encouragement. May I?”

Styr had made up her mind: having delivered him from wreck, she would lead him to the threshold of his future, then return to her solitudes, pluming herself upon her successful rôle of a kindly fate in the life of a fellow-mortal so much more interesting than the musical fledglings that came to her for advice and help. For a few months she would indulge herself in the luxury and novelty of a friendship, give her mind a companion; later on, vary her isolation with a permanent interest in the career of another. She made no doubt that were Ordham carried safely over this critical interval there was a reasonable chance of his attaining a high and useful eminence. It was a strange rôle for her to be contemplating, that of becoming a deliberate factor in the life of a man with no thought save his own good; but the more she had meditated upon it the more irresistibly had it appealed to her. She was honest enough, however, to admit that had she not liked him so thoroughly her philanthropic tendencies might have slept on undiscovered.

“I will strike a bargain with you,” she said. “If you will promise not to leave town except from Saturday noon until Sunday night, and take a daily lesson with Lutz until you are obliged to leave for England, you may come and go here as you please.”

“That will be every day, and I shall not go to country houses at all. The more I think of it the more I feel convinced that I should pass this August. My brother has never believed in me,—for good reasons, wise man,—but I have an idea that if I astonish him by passing a year sooner than any one expects, he will be so gratified that he will pay my debts. After all, he stands in the place of my father.”

“Are you deeply in debt?” All women sympathize with a man in debt except his wife, who must economize to get him out.

“Horribly!” Ordham buttered a scone and looked as blithe and greedy as a schoolboy on his first day at home.

“You always use such strong expressions!”

“O—h! Re—ally?” Ordham drawled this as only an Englishman can. “Well—perhaps you would not think close upon a thousand pounds a great amount, and I confess I find it disgusting to be unable to pay a sum which if I had in hand would not last me a month. And to Bridgminster it is nothing. I find that more disgusting still.”

“I suggested an American girl the other night—but I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t see you married.”

“I should hate to marry. My mother is always urging it—so are all my friends, and I suppose that between extravagant habits and the diplomatic career, I shall be driven into matrimony. But I wish to heaven Bridgminster would divide his income with me. He spends next to nothing. I hear he doesn’t even keep up Ordham.”

“Do you want money so much?”

“I need it.” He spoke with deep intensity.

“And you can think of no other resource but your brother or a rich girl?”

“No, alas!” He began to butter another scone. “All my relations are either poor or stingy.”

“But I had an idea that all dukes were rich and superb—your mother’s father—”

“He quarrels with his steward every quarter day over the accounts, the very household bills. I hate him, and so did my father. He cannot endure me because I don’t pot birds from the 12th of August until the hunting season begins and then ride to hounds every day. I have an idea he is afraid I will write poetry and disgrace the family. The metre would, no doubt.”

Margarethe looked at him curiously. According to American canons she ought to despise him, but he was so inevitably a part of a system, and so replete with all the delightful qualities for which that system was responsible, besides having an accent all his own, that she could but accept him as a matter of course. Nevertheless, more to draw him out than with motive, she asked: “I suppose it has never occurred to you to work?”

“Work?” He barely saved his knife from dropping to the little Sèvres plate. His eyes grew round and his mouth fell slightly apart.

Styr almost laughed outright, but she dropped her eyes to her cup and said: “Well, I am an American, you know. A young man over there, born in a position corresponding to your own—well, if he found himself in debt or wanted money badly, and there was no immediate prospect of inheritance, he would go to work and make it.”

“How odd! No, I don’t mean that. Of course I know those things do happen, but it must be when they feel fitted, have been prepared—for some of those things that make money. The only time I ever thought about it—one night not long ago,” he paled at the memory, “I could not think of any means by which I could support myself did I lose the little I have. But in America I suppose the business instinct is in every man’s brain—naturally. Why shouldn’t they be able to make fortunes if they must? Some of our chaps have to go to work also, but I never heard of any of them making a fortune—not even in the colonies. Only people you never heard of before do that. I suppose our brains are too old, they are no longer capable of that amount of concentration and energy. For generations we have had so many interests. To let a fixed idea like money-making control you, I fancy you must have, and inherit, little intellectual development. Nevertheless, I should think that those same indulgences and developments must be among the incentives.”

“That is the most ingenious defence I ever heard a lazy man put up! But I am not sure there is not a good deal in it. The fact remains, however, that you want money and do not want to marry. Suppose I send you to my banker in New York? He is a good friend of mine and would give you a chance of some sort. Would you concentrate your very superior faculties upon the making of money?”

“Good heavens, no! I should hate it. To spend one’s life trying to be more dishonest than the next man—I had rather live on a younger son’s portion all my life.” And he elevated his nose in aristocratic disgust.

“It is not quite as bad as that, although I do not pretend that great fortunes are made with gloves on.”

“I should hate the people I should be compelled to associate with. As I said just now, it requires enormous concentration to be a successful man of business; and fancy hearing no other topic of conversation day in and out, to see, to feel, nothing else in the men by whom one was surrounded!”

“You might be a cow-boy. That has appealed to other Englishmen, and is more picturesque—quite honest, also, I should think.”

“But so dirty, and such a hard life physically. They get up at four and go to bed with their boots on. Then, after they are quite demoralized, all their finer tastes hopelessly blunted, they come home without a penny. Heaven only knows into what limbo they disappear then. Don’t think I am really lazy.” (There was a genuine anxiety in his tones!) “What you said at Neuschwanstein about the possibility of finishing as a society drone has got me up every morning in time for Fräulein Lutz. I mean to pass my examinations and enter diplomacy. But I am afraid I am fitted for nothing else. I haven’t stumbled into it blindly. It is that or nothing, and although the suggestion was my mother’s, my father quite agreed with her.”

“It all comes back to this,—you must marry money.”

“Alas, yes! But four or five years hence. I will pay these bills somehow, and then I can run up others. They will always wait a few years.”

“But suppose you could meet some girl of great wealth whom you could love? That would be the ideal solution, and there are many rich and lovely girls. Should not you like peace of mind and happiness?”

“Happiness?” He stared at her in a fashion he had dropped into before, as if she were a mirror in which the future might take form. “I fancy that no matter whom I married . . . even if persuaded that I was in love with her . . . I should no sooner be settled down than I should begin to invent some one I might have loved better.” He came to himself with a smile. “Will you let me smoke? And tell you what a delight it is to see you again? And this room! To think that I may sit in it often! That we are to be friends for a whole summer! Nothing in life can ever be as wonderful as that.”