m her album. He took it and
also the pencil, looked alternately at the mountains and on the page of
the book, and without asking leave began to improve upon it,
strengthening a line here, lightening a shadow and giving greater
breadth, and then growing deeply interested in his work, he sat down
without ceremony on the mossy bank, took a piece of india-rubber, and
erasing here, adding lines there, sometimes laying in a shadow, giving
strength to the foreground and lightness to the background, he ended by
making a really pretty and artistic sketch.

The girl had watched him wonderingly, and said as he returned the
album, "But you are a great artist," and without letting him speak she
went on, "and by your appearance I had taken you for a student! But you
are not in the least like a student, nor in fact like a German either.
I have often met Indian princes in society in London, and I think you
are very much like them."

Wilhelm smiled. "There is a grain of truth in what you say, although
you overrate it a little. A great artist I certainly am not, nor even a
little one, but I have always observed much and painted a good deal
myself, and originally I thought of devoting myself to an artist's
career; and if I have nothing in common with Indian princes, and am
merely a plebeian German, I very likely have a drop of Indian blood in
my veins."

"Really," she said, with curiosity.

"Yes, my mother was a Russian German living in Moscow, and whose
father, a Thuringian, had married a Russian girl of gypsy descent.
Through this grandmother, whom I never knew, I am related by remote
genealogical descent to Indians. But you do not look like a German
either, with your beautiful dark hair and eyebrows."

She took this personal compliment in good part as she answered quickly:

"There is some reason for that too. Just as you have Indian, I have
French blood in my veins. My father's mother was a Colonial, her maiden
name was Du Binache."

So they gossiped on like old acquaintances. Young and beautiful as they
were, they found the deepest pleasure in one another, and the cold
feeling of strangeness melted as by a charm. They were awakened to the
consciousness that half an hour earlier neither of them had an idea of
the other's existence, by the appearance of a girl in the gap in the
wall, who seemed very much surprised at the sight of their evident
intimacy. The young lady stood up rather hastily and went a few steps
toward the newc