f pale roses. But this
was not the girl of a few hours back. The small head was bent back as
if the massive light brown braids were too heavy for it, and an
expression of proud reserve which he had not before perceived, rested
on the open countenance.

Two gentlemen started forward to greet the ladies; the first gallantly
offered his arm to the mother, the other approached the young girl. She
thanked him proudly, scarcely touching his arm with her finger-tips.
Then suddenly this figure from which he could not take his eyes,
vanished like a beautiful vision.

The encounter had left him in a mood of intense excitement. He bestowed
a dollar on a poor woman who stood beside him with a miserable child in
her arms, and he ordered out so big a glass of hot wine for old
Summerfeld, his coachman, that the old man was alarmed and hoped "they
should get home all right."

"What folly it is," said Linden to himself. And when a moment later his
carriage drove up, and at the same moment the notes of a Strauss waltz
struck his ear, he began to hum the air of "The Rose of the South."
Then the carriage rattled over the market-place out on the dark country
road, and sooner than usual he was at home in his quiet little room,
taking a thousand pleasant thoughts with him.

In the manor-house at Niendorf there was one room in which roses
bloomed in masses; not only in the boxes between the double windows or
in the pots on the sill according to the season, but in the room
itself, thousands of earth's fairest flowers were wreathed about the
pictures and furniture. It had a strange effect, especially when
instead of the sleeping beauty one might have expected to find here,
one perceived a very old woman in an arm chair by the window,
unweariedly engaged in cutting leaves and petals out of colored silk
paper, shaping and putting them together so that at length a rose
trembled on its wire stem, looking as natural from a little distance as
if it had just been cut from the bush. Aunt Rosalie could not live
without making roses; she lavished half her modest income on silk
paper, and every one whom she wished well, received a wreath of roses
as a present, red, pink, white and yellow blossoms tastefully
intermixed. All the village beauties wore roses of Aunt Rosalie's
manufacture in their well-oiled hair at the village dances. The graves
in the church-yard displayed masses of white and crimson roses from the
same store, torn and faded by wind and