be
waxworks, liable to melt if sun-shone-on! Fer _me_, _Hi_ says that
them as is too fine for Soho houghtn't to be _livin'_ 'ere. That's
w'at _Hi_ says--halthough 'e pyes as reg'lar as clockworks."

"Clockworks fawther with a waxworks darter!" cried the slavey, who had
a taste for humor of a kind. "Th' one 'ud stop if t'other melted.
_That's_ sure."

"'E hidolizes 'er that much hit mykes me think o' Roman Catholics an'
such," the landlady replied.

Then, for a time, she paused in thought, while the slavey lost herself
in dreams that, possibly, she had been serving and been worshiping a
real princess. As the height of the ambition of all such as she, in
London, is to be humble before rank, the mere thought filled her with
delight and multiplied into the homage of a subject for an over-lord
the love she felt already for the charming German girl of whom they
spoke.

"She _might_ be," said the landlady, at length.

"W'at? Princesses?" inquired the wistful slavey.

The landlady looked shrewdly at her. It might be that by thus
confiding to the servant her own speculations as to her lodgers'
rank, she had been sowing seed of some extravagance. Hypnotized by the
idea, the slavey might slip to the two mysterious Germans, sometime,
something which would not be charged upon the bill! "Nothink of the
sort!" she cried, therefore, hastily. "An' don't you never tyke no
coals to 'em that you don't tell abaht--you 'ear?"

The slavey promised, but the seed was sown. From that time on full
many a small attention fell to the Herr Kreutzer and his pretty,
gentle-mannered, dark-haired, big-eyed Anna of which the landlady knew
nothing, and many a dream of romance did the smutted slavey's small,
sad eyes see in the kitchen fire on lonely evenings while she was
waiting for the last lodger to come in before she went to bed behind
the kindlings-bin. And the central figures of these dreams were,
always, the beautiful young German girl and her dignified,
independent, shabby, courteous old father.

In the small orchestra where Kreutzer played, he made no friends among
the other musical performers; when the manager of the dingy little
theatre politely tried to pump him as to details of his history he
managed to evade all answers in the least illuminating, although he
never failed to do so with complete politeness.

All that really was known of him was that he had arrived in London,
years ago, with only two possessions which he seemed to