ssion, proper for a young man with high
connections, whose mother had a big farm in the Elbe valley. There
was often an interesting discontent in his blue eyes, and every
Bohemian girl he met imagined herself the cause of that unsatisfied
expression. He had a way of drawing out his cambric handkerchief
slowly, by one corner, from his breast-pocket, that was melancholy
and romantic in the extreme. He took a little flight with each
of the more eligible Bohemian girls, but it was when he was with
little Marie Tovesky that he drew his handkerchief out most slowly,
and, after he had lit a fresh cigar, dropped the match most
despairingly. Any one could see, with half an eye, that his proud
heart was bleeding for somebody.

One Sunday, late in the summer after Marie's graduation, she met
Frank at a Bohemian picnic down the river and went rowing with him
all the afternoon. When she got home that evening she went straight
to her father's room and told him that she was engaged to Shabata.
Old Tovesky was having a comfortable pipe before he went to bed.
When he heard his daughter's announcement, he first prudently
corked his beer bottle and then leaped to his feet and had a turn
of temper. He characterized Frank Shabata by a Bohemian expression
which is the equivalent of stuffed shirt.

"Why don't he go to work like the rest of us did? His farm in the
Elbe valley, indeed! Ain't he got plenty brothers and sisters?
It's his mother's farm, and why don't he stay at home and help her?
Haven't I seen his mother out in the morning at five o'clock with
her ladle and her big bucket on wheels, putting liquid manure on
the cabbages? Don't I know the look of old Eva Shabata's hands?
Like an old horse's hoofs they are--and this fellow wearing gloves
and rings! Engaged, indeed! You aren't fit to be out of school,
and that's what's the matter with you. I will send you off to the
Sisters of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis, and they will teach you
some sense, _I_ guess!"

Accordingly, the very next week, Albert Tovesky took his daughter,
pale and tearful, down the river to the convent. But the way to
make Frank want anything was to tell him he couldn't have it. He
managed to have an interview with Marie before she went away,
and whereas he had been only half in love with her before, he now
persuaded himself that he would not stop at anything. Marie took
with her to the convent, under the canvas lining of her trunk, the
results of a laborious an