it is
bleak never to have been loved. Margaret remembered her delicate,
girlish dreams with a recoil of humiliation; they seemed to her almost
immodest. She thought she was too old to wear hats, and wondered whether
she ought not to discard the pinks and light blues which poor Elly had
liked on her, for more sedate colors. But she wore pink after she met
Max Butler. Yet he never saw her save in the presence of others. He was
full of little, graceful attentions, but he showed the same attentions
to the portly clergyman's widow and the meritorious but cross-eyed
teacher of fifty, who formed Miss Wing's "party"; it was only his eyes,
his eyes always following her, approvingly, delighting, admiring,
pleading, speaking to her as they spoke to no other woman. She told
herself that it was just the pleasant, foreign way; and she wrote to her
friends in America, "The German officers have very agreeable,
deferential manners; I think they are much more gentle and polite and
have a higher respect for women than the French or Italians." And he
said no word, even of friendship, until that afternoon at the
Heidelberger Schloss.

He came upon her almost immediately, scrambling up the bank at a rate
which had worked woe to his uniform. He was torn, he was scratched, he
was stained with mud and grass; and he was beaming with delight. "I have
seen you from below," he exclaimed in his careful English, "so I came
up. Will you excuse?" Then his mood changed, perceiving her plight, and
he insisted on tearing his handkerchief into strips to bind her ankle.
It seemed absurd to refuse his aid, which he offered quite simply; but
his hands trembled a little over the knots. "It will be most easy, I
think," said he, "that you should let me assist you a small way, to the
_restauracion_; so I can get the carriage, and you can have some ice
cream. Again, to-day, is it burned--"

She had laughed and said that she never had heard of burned ice cream.
He laughed, too, and explained that it was burned as a custard, and
somehow under cover of this she let him put her hand on his shoulder and
his arm about her waist. She was grateful to him for the matter-of-fact
manner in which he did it all, saying, "You will have to be my comrade
that has been wounded, and I will help him off the field; so I did,
once, with my colonel; it is better than to wait until I could bring
help." In this fashion they walked for some twenty minutes. They were
minutes not entirely