n the faint light
between-decks his spectacles shone palely, like twin moons.

"I am habby you are come," he said. "My wive will be habby. . . .
I told her a dozzen times it will be ol' right--the ship has arrived
before she is agspected. . . . But our liddle Korona is so agscited,
so imbatient for her well-beloved England."

He pronounced "England" as we write it.

"So!" he proclaimed, halting before a door and throwing it open.

Within, on a cheap wooden travelling-trunk, sat a stout woman and a
child. The child wore black weeds, and had--as Nurse Branscome noted
at first glance--remarkably beautiful eyes. Her right hand lay
imprisoned between the two palms of the stout woman, who, looking up,
continued to pat the back of it softly.

"A friendt--for our Mees Korona!"

"Whad did I not tell you?" said the stout woman to the child, cooing
the words exultantly, as she arose to meet the visitor.

The two women looked in each other's eyes, and each divined that the
other was good.

"Good afternoon," said Nurse Branscome. "I am sorry to be late."

"But it is we who are early. . . . We tell the liddle one she must
have bribed the cabdain, she was so craved to arr-rive!"

"Are you related to her?"

"Ach, no," chimed in husband and wife together as soon as they
understood. "But friendts--friendts, Korona--_hein?_"

The husband explained that they had made the child's acquaintance on
the first day out from New York, and had taken to her at once, seeing
her so forlorn. He was a baker by trade, and by name Muller; and he
and his wife, after doing pretty well in Philadelphia, were returning
home to Bremen, where his brother (also a baker) had opened a
prosperous business and offered him a partnership.

--"Which he can well afford," commented Frau Muller. "For my husband
is beyond combetition as a master-baker; and at the end all will go
to his brother's two sons. . . . We have not been gifen children of
our own."

"Yet home is home," added her husband, with an expansive smile,
"though it be not the Vaterland, Mees Korona--_hein?_" He eyed the
child quizzically, and turned to Nurse Branscome. "She is badriotic
so as you would nevar think--

"'Brit-ons nevar, nevar, nev-ar-will be Slavs!'"

He intoned it ludicrously, casting out both hands and snapping his
fingers to the tune.

The child Corona looked past him with a gaze that put aside these
foolish antics, and fastened itself on Nurse Branscome.