to a point. Affecting moments
jolt hard in him--moments when embarrassment is natural to all
humans.

At the gate, for the last time, the Herr was energetically smoking
his long pipe. The Frau frequently wiped her sweating face with a
handkerchief. The boys kept kicking away the dogs whose barking half
drowned the parting words. Gard said good-by, too, to the old linden
by his window. How one can miss a tree!

And Elsa! He flattered himself she looked a mite regretful that he
was going. She was starting for her class when she joined the
topsy-turvy group by the gate and waved her creamy hand. Her small
straw hat, wreathed fatiguingly in roses, clung desperately to her
head in the awkward way German women have of wearing headgear, and
made her, despite her blossom-like attractiveness, seem quaint and
so truly German like the rest. She looked to Gard as pink and blonde
as the year before when he had first been dazzled by her glistening
hair.

On crossing the river he could see her moving down their meadow path
where Heine had sung to him, her etching materials under her arm.
One last look at the row of knightly castles rimming the heights
above her and at the storied Elbe at her feet as she hurried along!
He gulped down a small something in his throat, and turned his face
toward the station.

After all, Dresden had been a year of his life.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

A JOURNEY

At Eisenach, bound for Frankfort, the train guard punched Kirtley's
ticket and showed him into a compartment that was empty save for a
military figure engaged in reading a large newspaper, holding it
firmly with gloved hands before his face. Although the day was warm,
an army cap was clapped down low on the head.

Gard sank back on the cushions and closed his eyes. He was somewhat
fatigued from having climbed the Wartburg whose castle, famed in the
history of Luther, lay asleep there like a long and oddly shaped
beetle. He soon fell into a doze. When he became conscious again,
his companion's countenance was buried as before in the paper.
Underneath it, gray trousers and large boots protruded in Kirtley's
direction as if to ward off any familiar approach.

That editorial page must be extensive and absorbing, Kirtley
commented to himself as he whiffed the refreshing breeze that came
in his window from Hesse close by on the west. In a delicious
half-dreaminess he thought the stranger turned the journal and that
a reddish, be-whiskered vi