-ground.

He escorted his wife chivalrously home, and led her, without a word, to
the mirror.

Her starched shirt was crumpled, and wet through with perspiration,
also her shoes were trodden all out of shape.

"Dear Marion," he said, "I have no objection to your going to balls as
_decolletee_ as ever you please, for you are beautiful ..." and he
kissed her neck; "but I do beg you not to exhibit yourself like this
again."

Marion coloured and answered: "Yes, you're right, Hubby! Now I know why
Froeben and Landsberg were staring at me so."

Then she pouted: "But Frau von Gropphusen looked nice dressed like
this!"

Her husband answered quietly: "My child, '_quod licet Jovi, non licet
bovi._'"

"What? What does that mean?"

Kauerhof translated gallantly, "You are prettier than the Gropphusen,
my Marion; but she is thinner than you."

For one must be polite to a wife who is by birth a von Lueben, and the
daughter of the head of a department in the War Office.

Reimers was not, like his comrades, accustomed to spend the greater
part of his leisure in frivolity and flirting. It therefore never
occurred to him to conceal his admiration for Frau von Gropphusen.

It often happened that he missed the easiest balls, fascinated in
watching the movements and graceful attitudes of his opponent. Her
feet, which even in the unflattering tennis-shoes looked small and
dainty, seemed merely to skim over the ground like the wings of a
passing swallow; and the most daring bounds and leaps, which in others
would have been grotesque, she accomplished with the easy agility of a
cat.

Reimers asked himself where his eyes had been that all this should
hitherto have passed him unnoticed. He thought he had never seen
anything so exquisite. But Hannah Gropphusen would scold him when he
stood gazing thus in naive admiration.

"Herr Reimers," she would cry, "how inattentive you are. You must
really look after the balls better!"

But when she noted the direction of his admiring glances, a delicate
flush would overspread her face and mount to her white brow, on which a
single premature furrow was curiously noticeable.

"You see, Herr Reimers," she said, one evening in May, "we are the last
again."

The sun had just set. A light mist rising from the river was faintly
coloured by the last red rays.

Frau von Gropphusen rested her foot on a garden chair and refastened
the strap of her shoe. Reimers stood watching, with his racquet