So
much so that even now I'm not so sure that it was one! There--I suppose
that makes it all ten times worse. But I won't apologise again. Do you
mind giving me that stick?"

I had rested the two of them against the chair between us. Mrs.
Lascelles had taken possession of one, with which she was methodically
probing the path, for there had been no time to draw their Alpine teeth.
She did not comply with my request. She smiled instead.

"I mind very much," her old voice said. "Now we have finished fighting,
perhaps you will listen to the _Meistersinger_--for it is worth
listening to on that band--and try to appreciate Baden while you are
here. There are no more trains for hours."

The wooded hills rose over the bandstand, against the bright blue sky.
The shadow of the colonnade lay sharp and black beyond our feet, with
people passing, and the band crashing, in the sunlight beyond. That was
Baden. I should not have found it a difficult place to appreciate, a
week or so before; even now it was no hardship to sit there listening to
the one bit of Wagner that my ear welcomes as a friend, and furtively to
watch my companion as she sat and listened too. You will perceive by
what train of associations my eyes soon fell upon the Tauchnitz volume
which she must have placed without thinking on the chair between us. I
took it up. Heavens! It was one of the volumes of Browning's Poems. And
back I sped in spirit to a green ledge overlooking the Gorner Glacier,
to think what we had said about Browning up there, but only to remember
how I had longed to be to Mrs. Lascelles what Catherine Evers had been
to me. There were some sharp edges to the reminiscence, but I turned the
pages while they did their worst, and so cut myself to the heart upon a
sharper than them all. It was in a poem I remembered, a poem whose title
pained me into glancing farther. And see what leapt to meet me from the
printed page:

"And I,--what I seem to my friend, you see:
What I soon shall seem to his love, you guess:
What I seem to myself, do you ask of me?
No hero, I confess."

True, too true; no hero, indeed; anything in the wide world else! But
that I should read it there by the woman's side! And yet, even that was
no such coincidence; had we not talked about the poet, had I not implied
what Catherine thought of him, what everybody ought to think?

Of a sudden a strange thrill stirred me; sidelong I glanced at my
companion. She had turned