chamber, where he took from
the clothes-press an elegant travelling suit. The remainder of his
civilian clothes he packed carefully and compactly in the large trunk
which Leimann meanwhile had sent down. He placed them next to Frau
Leimann's finery in the huge trunk, and on top of them the few other
trifles above enumerated. Then he had the trunk taken to the station.

Leimann meanwhile was on his way to Berlin. His wife, however, was
still very busy,--burning up packages of letters which she did not
wish either her husband or her companion to read, and then put into a
handbag a few objects of the kind which only women cherish, and the
sole value of which lies in the recollections clinging to them. It is
astonishing what resplendent images a woman can conjure before her
inner vision when in the possession of such faded flowers, bits of
ribbon, and the like.

Lastly came the leave-taking from Bubi, her little two-year-old son,
and this she had fancied the day before a much harder achievement than
it now turned out. She felt some qualms of conscience as she now, with
a light heart, without a tear, left behind her her only child,--left
it motherless, exposed to a future probably troubled and cheerless.

It was strange, she thought. From the first moment on she had
experienced something like aversion for this child with the broad
nose, the large mouth, and the small, shifting eyes. When but a couple
of weeks old, the baby had shown a striking resemblance to his father,
and the more the estrangement grew between his parents, the more
dwindled the small remnant of her mother love. She regarded this tiny
human being, ugly and eternally crying, as solely _his_ child. It was
in this way that the poor little fellow had spent nearly the whole of
his short existence,--either in the kitchen or with the servants,
fondled, scolded, and educated by hirelings. The mother herself
frequently had not seen her child even for a minute a day.

She had the conviction that her husband had deserved no better
treatment at her hands, and because of that she scarcely gave him a
thought during these last hours spent at her home. When she boarded,
at three o'clock in the afternoon, a first-class compartment of the
express train for Frankfort, she did so with a spirit light and almost
gay.

And the same was true of Borgert. He likewise cast to the winds any
slight sentiments of regret at leaving the garrison, and as the train,
some hours after F