he region of
her heart threatening to force its way out and shriek. There were times
when she gave way to despair, and thought of her vigorous youth with a
shudder, and at other times she was so angry and humiliated at her
surrender and secret chaos, that she was on the point more than once of
breaking definitely with Franz Nettelbeck, or even of going back to
Germany. If he missed a Wednesday, or failed to write, she slipped out
of the house at night and paced Central Park for hours, fighting her
rebellious nerves with her pride and the strong independent will that
she had believed would enable her to leap lightly over every pitfall in
life.

Then he would come and her spirits would soar, her whole awakened being
possessed by a sort of reckless fury, a desperate resolve to enjoy the
meager portion of happiness allotted to her by an always grudging fate;
and for a few days after he left she would give herself up to blissful
and extravagant dreams.

But Nettelbeck was by no means lightly in love with Gisela Doering.
During the third summer, partly owing to the increased independence of
her growing charges, partly to his own expert management, they met in
long solitudes seldom disturbed. Gisela dismissed fears, ignored the
inevitable end, plunged headlong and was wildly happy. Nettelbeck was an
ardent and absorbed lover, for he knew that his time was short, and he
was determined to have one perfect memory in his secret life that the
woman who bore his name should never violate. Miss Howland had meted him
the portion his dilatoriness invited and married a fine upstanding young
American whose career was in Washington; and his family had peremptorily
commanded him to return in the spring (with the Kaiser's permission, a
mandate in itself) and marry the patient Baronin Irma Hammorwoerth.

And so for a summer and a winter they were happy.

Gisela averted her mind tonight from the parting with something of the
almost forgotten panic. She had never dared to dwell upon it, nor on the
month that followed. Her powerful will had rebelled finally and she had
fought down and out of her consciously functioning mind the details of
her tragic passion, and even reveled arrogantly in the sensation of
deliverance from the slavery of love. Simultaneously she was swept off
to see the great natural wonders of the American continent and they had
intoned the requiem.

The following autumn she returned to Germany and paid her mother another