.

Wilhelm listened to this chatter with mixed feelings. If she seemed
superficial, he reconciled himself by a glance at her beautiful silken
hair, at her laughing brown eyes, at her roguish dimples, and instantly
he pleaded with his cooler reason for pardon for the lovely girl--he
for nineteen years had had other things beside pleasure to think of!
These charms seemed enough to work the taming magic of Orpheus over the
wild animals of the woods.

"And you were never," he asked timidly as she paused, "a little bit in
love?"

"I can look after myself," she answered, with a silvery laugh, and
Wilhelm felt as if an iron band had been lifted from his heart, like
the trusty Henry's in the story.

"That points to marvelous wisdom in a child of society--seeing so many
people--so attractive! You are indifferent then to admiration?"

"I did not say that. My fancy has been often enough touched, but--"

"But your heart has not?"

"No."

"Really not?" continued he, in a tone of voice in which, he himself
detected the anxiety.

She shook her head, and looked down thoughtfully. But after a short
pause she raised her rosy face and said, "No--better die than speak
untruths--I was rather in love with our pastor who confirmed me. He was
thin and pale with long hair, much longer than yours. And he spoke very
beautifully and powerfully--I felt sentimental when I thought of him.
But I soon got to know his wife, who was as pointed and hard as a
knitting needle, and his children, whose number I never could count
exactly, and my youthful feelings received a severe chill." She
laughed, and Wilhelm joined her heartily.

It was now his turn to relate his story. He was as to his birthplace
hardly a German, but a Russian, as he first saw the light in Moscow, in
the year 1845.

"So you are now twenty-four?"

"Last May. Are you frightened at such an age, fraulein?"

"That is not so old, twenty-four--particularly for a man," she
protested with great earnestness.

His father, he went on, was from Konigsberg, had studied philology, and
when he left the university had become a tutor in a distinguished
Russian family. He was the child of poor parents, and had to take the
first opportunity which presented itself of earning his living. So he
went to Russia, where he lived for twenty years as a tutor in private
families, and then as a teacher in a Moscow gymnasium. He married late
in life, an only child of German descent, who helped her mi