ge line. He was a
loud-voiced, merry man; and he aired his wit freely, though evidently
with no intent to be unkind, upon the lover out of whose lucklessness
his own luck had come. Even as pretty a girl as Christine could not
have more than one husband at a time, said this big Conrad, with great
good-humor; and so, since they could not both marry her, Andreas would
do well to stop crying over spilled milk. They all would be very good
friends, he added, and Andreas would be godfather to the first child. He
put out his big hand as he made this proffer of friendship; and although
Andreas could not refuse to clasp it, there was not, in truth, any great
store of friendliness for Christine's loud-voiced husband in his heart.
So soon as this was possible, he was glad to get away from the merry
Sunday afternoon gathering in his uncle's fine parlor to the more
sympathetic society of his birds. Yet there did not seem to him much
music in the singing of his birds that day.

Christine was vastly proud of her big, rosy-faced, noisy husband, whose
sausage-making greatly prospered, and to whom the American dollars
rolled in bravely. But even in these days of her good-luck she sometimes
found herself thinking--when Conrad's rough love-making was still
further roughened, and his noisiness greatly increased, by too free
draughts of heady German beer--of the gentler ways and constant
tenderness of her earlier lover, whose love, with her own promise to be
true to it, she had so lightly cast aside. Thoughts of this sort, it is
true, did not often trouble her, but now and then they gave her a little
heart-pang; and the pang would be intensified, sometimes, as the thought
also would come to her that perhaps it was because she had broken
her plighted troth that her many prayers to become a mother remained
unanswered.

As time went on, Christine's sorrows came to be of a more instant sort.
Her too jolly husband's fondness for heady beer grew upon him, and with
its increase came a decrease in the success that until then had been
attendent upon his sausage-making. His business fell away from him by
degrees into soberer and steadier hands, which had the effect of making
him take to stronger drinks than beer in order that he might the more
effectually forget his troubles. He lost his merriness, and somewhat of
his loudness, and became sullen; and the wolf always was shrewdly near
the door. Thus, in a very bad way indeed, things went on for half
a