to do with such proposed bloody
belligerence.

Only Rudi could be called somewhat martial. Hydraulics was his
branch, and his frequent absences on missions about which he assumed
an important and mystifying air, such as is, for that matter, usual
in bumptious young men, never caused any comment or visible interest
on the part of the others. He gave himself out to be close to the
_militaire_, familiar with its secrets, as he freely blew his
cigarette smoke across the meal table; and to him the family
deferred on these subjects. Surely all this was to Gard very
foreign and interesting.

"What a different race of beings! What a curious revelation to
observe, what a doughty complex to comprehend!"

He was more confounded by the attitude of the women. They were even
fiercer than the men. To them the other Europeans were a wholly bad
lot. Those neighbors were so much in the way of the good, all-worthy
Germans. But it was on the English that this feminine hatred vented
itself most turbulently. Frau Bucher shouted that she would be more
than glad--she would be hilarious--if war came.

"I would wear my last rag for years, see my two boys dead on the
battle front, if Gross Britain could be knocked into the bottom of
the sea."

Was all this a part of that national gladness Gard was observing in
Germany and could not gage, could not yet give an explicit and
sufficient reason for? Those old-time Teuton liberals, masters of
prose and verse--how would they feel at home in this modern
Rhineland of hysterical spleen and arms provocative? Was it
possible he had really come on a sort of fool's errand?

CHAPTER VII

GERMAN LOVING

Fraeulein Elsa was a blooming, almost blue-eyed young woman of
twenty. Such a fresh, strawberry and cream complexion under a
plenteous harvest of flaxen hair would not be associated in America
with anyone very serious. _There_ she would have been thought
arrayed by Nature as a tearing blonde, suitable for the equivocal
light stage, or as a frivolous artist's model, or as promenade girl
in a suit and cloak house. But in Fraeulein the extraordinary
combination of volatile comeliness and unimpeachable earnestness
daily worked growing wonders in Kirtley.

It is a luckless young traveler who does not find himself or herself
engaged in some romance, permanent or transient, which ever after
sweetens or gilds the memories of the tour. Moreover Gard was at an
age when youthful susceptibilities were s