e,
and suddenly she threw herself on his breast, weeping bitterly. The
colonel was not quite sure what was the best way to meet this outburst.
He did not like to touch too pointedly upon the cause of his child's
grief. Then he fell back on a method with which he had quieted Marie in
days of old, before she had ever gone to school.

When the motherless child was weeping her heart out over some trouble
that had possessed her, even when she was quite a big school-girl, he
would take her in his arms and carry her up and down the room,
consoling and comforting her, till the wild sobbing ceased at last. She
was now nearly twenty years of age; but the old method might still be
effective. Unresisting she let him take her in his arms, and leaned her
face against her father's cheek; bright tears ran down from his own
eyes as he whispered to her over and over again: "Yes, cry, my little
girl; cry, Mariechen!"

And the first great sorrow of the woman calmed itself, even as had the
school-girl's trivial griefs. The colonel carried his daughter tenderly
to her room and laid her down on the sofa. With a shy gesture she
buried her face in the cushion. Once more the father's hand passed
lightly over her brow, then he went out on tip-toe. Time must be the
physician that would heal this wound.

Falkenhein listened for a second at the door: Mariechen was still
weeping; but he could hope that the tempest would subside. That tearful
outburst, uncontrolled as it was, showed still the unruly grief of a
child. The blow that strikes deepest into the heart and embitters a
whole life-time is otherwise met and parried, with a grim, silent,
enduring pain. Traces of such pain he had seen in Reimers' hopeless
eyes; for his child he might expect a cure.

The best thing would be to take Marie away into entirely new
surroundings.

As usual, each year during the partridge-shooting, the colonel one day
received an invitation to join the royal party. At breakfast the old
king asked him: "Well, Falkenhein, what do you say? That longlegged
Friesen in the War Office has obtained command of the Lusatian brigade.
How would you like to be chief of the department?"

The colonel hesitated with his answer.

"I know quite well," the old gentleman went on, "that you have a
disinclination for anything that smells of the office, even though
fifteen hundred others would lick their lips over it."

"Your Majesty is very good," said Falkenhein. "I will do whatev