horizon. Cottages began to appear at the roadside.

Standing and moving in the soft air was the strong sour smell of baking
schwarzbrot. A big bony-browed woman came from a dark cottage and stood
motionless in the low doorway, watching them with kindly body. Miriam
glanced at her face--her eyes were small and expressionless, like Anna's
... evil-looking.

Presently they were in a narrow street. Miriam's footsteps hurried.
She almost cried aloud. The facades of the dwellings passing slowly on
either hand were higher, here and there one rose to a high peak, pierced
geometrically with tiny windows. The street widening out ahead showed
an open cobbled space and cross-roads. At every angle stood high quiet
peaked houses, their faces shining warm cream and milk-white, patterned
with windows.

They overtook the others drawn up in the roadway before a long low
wooden house. Miriam had time to see little gilded figures standing
out in niches in rows all along the facade and rows of scrollwork dimly
painted, as she stood still a moment with beating heart behind the
group. She heard Fraulein talking in English of councillors and
centuries and assumed for a moment as Fraulein's eye passed her a look
of intelligence; then they had all moved on together deeper into
the town. She clung to Minna, talking at random... did she like
Hoddenheim... and Minna responded to the full, helping her, talking
earnestly and emphatically about food and the sunshine, isolating the
two of them; and they all reached the cobbled open space and stood still
and the peaked houses stood all round them.

15

"You like old-time Germany, Miss Henderson?"

Miriam turned a radiant face to Fraulein Pfaff's table and made some
movement with her lips.

"I think you have something of the German in you."

"She has, she has," said Minna from the little arbour where she sat with
Millie. "She is not English."

They had eaten their lunch at a little group of arboured tables at the
back of an old wooden inn. Fraulein had talked history to those nearest
to her and sat back at last with her gauze veil in place, tall and
still in her arbour, sighing happily now and again and making her little
sounds of affectionate raillery as the girls finished their coffee
and jested and giggled together across their worm-eaten, green-painted
tables.

"You have beautiful old towns and villages in England," said Fraulein,
yawning slightly.

"Yes--but not anything like th