ave owned to it, they were not, I think,
sorry to hear that the greater part of the fourth day's travels was to
be on wheels. But they were very well off. Lutz von Walden and his
two friends--a young baron, rather the typical "German student" in
appearance, though in reality as hearty and unsentimental as any John
Bull of his age and rank--and George Norman, an English boy of seventeen
or eighteen, "getting up" German for an army examination--were all three
only too ready to carry my little boy on their backs on any sign of
over-fatigue. And, indeed, more than one hint reached me that they would
willingly have done the same by Nora, had the dignity of her twelve
years allowed of such a thing. She scarcely looked her age at that time,
but she was very conscious of having entered "on her teens," and the
struggle between this new importance and her hitherto almost boyish
tastes was amusing to watch. She was strong and healthy in the extreme,
intelligent though not precocious, observant but rather matter-of-fact,
with no undue development of the imagination, nothing that by any kind
of misapprehension or exaggeration could have been called "morbid" about
her. It was a legend in the family that the word "nerves" existed not
for Nora: she did not know the meaning of _fear_, physical or moral. I
could sometimes wish she had never learnt otherwise. But we must take
the bad with the good, the shadow inseparable from the light. The first
perception of things not dreamt of in her simple childish philosophy
came to Nora as I would not have chosen it; but so, I must believe, it
had to be.

"Where are we to sleep to-night, Herr von Walden, please?" asked Reggie
from the heights of Lutz's broad shoulders, late that third afternoon,
when we were all, not the children only, beginning to think that a rest
even in the barest of inn parlours, and a dinner even of the most
modest description, would be very welcome.

"Don't tease so, Reggie," said Nora. "I'm sure Herr von Walden has told
you the name twenty times already."

"Yes, but I forget it," urged the child; and good-natured Herr von
Walden, nowise loath to do so again, took up the tale of our projected
doings and destinations.

"To-night, my dear child, we sleep at the pretty little town--yes,
town I may almost call it--of Seeberg. It stands in what I may call an
oasis of the forest, which stops abruptly, and begins again some miles
beyond Seeberg. We should be there in another ho