that
too. He happens to be intelligent, and is not to be persuaded that a
spade is anything but a spade, however much it may be got up to look
like the Ark of the Covenant or anything else archaic and
bedizened--God forbid, little mother, that you should suppose I meant
that dreadful pun.

Frau Kloster had brought food with her, part of which was cherries, and
they slid down one's hot dry throat like so many cool little blessings.
I could hardly believe that I had really escaped the Sunday dinner at
the pension. We were very content, all of us I think, sitting on the
grass by the water's edge, a tiny wind stirring our hair--except
Kloster's, because he so happily hasn't got any, which must be
delicious in hot weather,--and rippling along the rushes.

"She grows less pale every hour," Kloster said to Herr von Inster,
fixing his round eyes on me.

Herr von Inster looked at me with his grave shrewd ones, and said
nothing.

"We brought out a windflower," said Kloster, "and behold we will return
with a rose. At present, Mees Chrees, you are a cross between the two.
You have ceased to be a windflower, and are not yet a rose. I wager
that by five o'clock the rose period will have set in."

They were both so kind to me all day, you can't think little mother,
and so was Frau Kloster, only one keeps on forgetting her. Herr von
Inster didn't talk much, but he looked quite as content as the rest of
us. It is strange to remember that only this morning I was writing
about feeling so lonely and by myself in spirit. And so I was; and so
I have been all this week. But I don't feel like that now. You see
how the company of one righteous man, far more than his prayers,
availeth much. And the company of two of them availeth exactly double.
Kloster is certainly a righteous man, which I take it means a man who
is both intelligent and good, and so I am sure is Herr von Inster. If
he were not, he, a Junker and an officer, would think being with people
so outside his world as the Klosters intolerable. But of course then
he wouldn't be with them. It wouldn't interest him. It is so funny to
watch his set, regular, wooden profile, and then when he turns and
looks at one to see his eyes. The difference just eyes can make! His
face is the face of the drilled, of the perfect unthinking machine, the
correct and well-born Oberleutnant; and out of it look the eyes of a
human being who knows, or will know I'm certain before life has