"The piano," Bobby threw in, more by way of showing without flagrant disrespect how little he was convinced by what Sir William was saying.

"Oh, but such difficult music!" Lady McIntyre rolled her blue eyes pathetically. "I'm told it's a national trait. The Germans don't play games. They 're a wonderful people, I'm sure. Take this young girl-" She lowered her voice, but since Napier, still holding up his end of the argument with Sir William, could perfectly follow Lady McIntyre's observations, he was morally certain that little of the conversation was lost on Miss von Schwarzenberg. She knitted steadily, while Madge played with the dog.

"Greta 's only twenty-five or six," Lady McIntyre went on, "and, as you hardly need be told, wohlgeboren, or even hoch wohlgeboren. Her father was an officer of Uhlans, an invalid now. And somehow they lost their money. An uncle in America is tremendously rich, and he 's had Greta at one of the great women's colleges over there. She insisted on going home every summer. So domestic, the Germans! I always think it 's extremely nice of them to feel affectionate toward such a horrid country as Germany, don't you, Mr. Grant? And such a language to wrestle with, poor things! Do you know, they call a thimble a finger-hat? Yes, and a pin a stick-needle. So confusing! But Greta 's a treasure. I'm morally convinced she 's saved me from a nervous collapse. Would you mind letting her play a round, sometimes, with you?"

“A— why— a-" Julian turned and looked round at Napier, as much as to say, "How long are you going to let this kind of thing go on without coming to my rescue?"

"It would be kind," Lady McIntyre hurried on. "She 's far too shy to suggest such a thing herself."

"Oh, I thought she was saying when we came in—”

"Yes; just that, after all, she 'd come to feel that, being in this part of the world, she ought to know a little of our great national game. I thought it showed a very nice feeling."

Again Julian looked toward the fireplace; but Napier presented a callous eye to the S. O. S. signal from his friend. Since Julian insisted on being so jolly philanthropic, let him have a good go at it.

Sir William was at the hottest point in the golf discussion when Miss Greta reached the turn of the heel. As she shifted her needles she raised her eyes, and met Napier's downward gaze. Very prettily Miss Greta blushed.

"Well, well,"-Sir William broke off short in the middle of a sentence, and rattled his seals with great vigor, as thought they were a summons to industry, a simulacrum of the factory bell or the works whistle,-"I must write one more letter. No, I don't need you Gavan."

"But that translation-"

"It's done!" Bobby 's tone of triumph revealed something of his latent antagonism to this Napier man, whom the son of the house had come back from school to find even more at home here than last year. "Father says it could n't be better done."

"Well, it could n't," said Sir William as he disappeared into the library. "Did you do it?" the astonished Napier asked the school-boy.

"Not me. Fräulein did it." "Bobby," said Madge, severely, "you are not to say Fräulein."

"Why not? She isn't Frau, is she?" "Fräulein von Schwarzenberg is how she is addressed," said Madge, with an unconscious assumption of the Schwarzenberg manner. "She says that English people who want to pretend they know German are always calling an unmarried lady 'Fräulein.''

Miss von Schwarzenberg knitted hard. "I was certainly taught in my youth," -Lady McIntyre was doing her best for

her son-"and by no less an authority than the grammarian Otto, that Miss, in German, was Fräulein."

"Well, and so it is," said Bobby, stoutly. "They still say that."

"Not at all." Madge was too bent on breaking a lance for Miss von Schwarzenberg to notice how inopportune the lady found the service. "In Germany," the girl went on, "you say Fräulein to waitresses and servants. Such people are 'Fräuleins.' But a lady is Fräulein this or that, never Fräulein alone. Because the French use 'Mademoiselle' for wellborn girls, you think the Germans must use Fräulein in the same way. The Germans don't copy the French. They have their own canons."

A peal of laughter greeted Madge's attempt at the grand style. Even Miss von Schwarzenberg joined in, though she had tried surreptitiously to stop Wildfire.

"Would you mind, dear, getting me the rest of this wool?"

Madge was instantly on her feet. "In your work-bag?" The lady nodded. When the girl had run out of the room Miss Greta looked up with candid chinablue eyes.

"Does it require a great deal of practice, Mr. Napier, to play golf passably?" "So that's why you haunt the links!" he said, half amused, half serious, as one making frank amends for an unjust suspicion.

But again Miss Greta blushed slightly as she said:

"I suppose I 've hoped that if I watched you, I'd stand a better chance of playing a fair game myself some day. Fair, that is," she added, with her meek droop of the braid-crowned head-"fair for a woman."

He did n't answer at once, and she turned in her chair to look at him. Out from her disarranged cushion rolled a large ball of gray. It bumped against Napier's ankle and rebounded to the wall.

"Is n't this the wool you were looking for?" He took it up by the loose end and rapidly unrolled several yards of it.

"Thank you so much! I can't think how it got down here." She took the ball from him and remained standing while she rewound. "After all, I sha'n't much more than have time to get on my things." She glanced at the clock.

"Where are you going?" Lady McIntyre asked the question from habit. She had got into a way of feeling more confidence in life, and particularly in Madge, if Greta was in the offing. Seldom was she allowed to leave the room nowadays without that "Where are you going?" The question, so unnecessary on this occasion, offered Julian his chance of escape. He seized it instantly to join Napier at the fire.

"You were so kind as to say I might have the cart."

"Oh, yes." Lady McIntyre remembered.

"What for?" asked Bobby. "Want to be driven somewhere? Bags I-"

"Certainly not!" Madge called out from the door. And then in a markedly different tone, "I 've turned everything out of-oh, you 've got it!"

"It was all right," Miss Greta said comprehensively; she would go to the station alone.

"Oh, please let me come!" Madge begged.

Miss von Schwarzenberg shook her head. Had anybody else in the world done that in similar circumstances, Wildfire McIntyre would have paid not the smallest attention. She would have gone on arguing, and if arguing did n't settle the matter to suit Wildfire, she would have stuck her boy's hat on the back of her head and said: "It 's my cart. If it goes to the station, I'm going to drive it." But now she looked at the Schwarzenberg wistfully. "I wish she was n't

coming." Then with a gleam, "I believe you do, too."

Miss von Schwarzenberg smiled. "Who is it?" demanded Bobby. "Oh, a little American friend of mine, a girl I went to school with."

"Her name 's Nan Ellis," Madge informed the company, gloomily, "and she is not much to look at and not at all rich and not much of anything that I can discover. Just a millstone round Miss Greta's neck."

"We must n't say that." Miss Greta was winding the last couple of yards. "You see, she 's an orphan, and I rather took her under my wing at school, poor child!"

not perhaps so very quick at-how do you say it?-not so quick at the uptake." She cast it back in a way that stirred a little breeze of laughter behind her disappearing figure. She turned at the sound of a motor-car rushing up the drive.

Through the open lobby doors a girl was seen rising from her seat and scanning Kirklamont Hall with a slight frown. As the car swerved round to the entrance she called out to the chauffeur in a voice of appalling distinctness and most unmistakably transatlantic:

"Are you sure this is the place? It isn't my idea of a-oh," she had given one glance through the lobby, and was out of the car as a bird goes over a hedge,

"Oh, no," said the wool-winder, now at the end of her task. "At the inn, of course."

But Miss Greta was to bring the girl to see them, Lady McIntyre said. "Any friend of Miss Greta's -" "It's very kind of you, dear Lady McIntyre." Miss Greta glanced again at the clock as she gathered up her knitting. "Cart was n't ordered till six," Madge threw in. "And you always say it is very kind of mama. Don't you mean to bring

her here at all?"

"I should be delighted; but I can't flatter myself that my little friend would interest you." She swept the circle.

"Why not?" said Bobby.

"Oh, well,"-Miss von Schwarzenberg was plainly not answering Master Bobby, —she's quite a nice girl; but"-A deprecatory wave of one hand-"well, crude; Western, you know."

"What I think is that you 're far too good-natured," announced Madge. "And you did tell her not to come, too."

Miss von Schwarzenberg smiled. "She has grown used to looking to me for the summer. I tried to explain that-" the pause was eloquent of a delicate desire to spare feelings-"that I was n't taking a holiday myself this year. But," on her way out of the hall Miss Greta laughed over her shoulder-"she 's

holding out her hands. "Greta!"

"My dear Nan." Miss von Schwarzenberg had hastened forward, more flurried than anybody there had ever seen her.

"Oh, my!" said the new-comer, with a face of rapture. "Oh, my!" and she fell to hugging Miss von Schwarzenberg.

Bobby sat contorting his long legs and arms with unregenerate glee at Fräulein's struggle to be cordial, and at the same time to disengage herself as rapidly as possible.

Lady McIntyre left her settle and pattered forward with hospitable intent. An instant of indecision on Miss von Schwarzenberg's part, and then Miss Ellis was duly presented.

car.

She was n't nearly so tall as Napier had thought her when she stood up in the This was because her figure was slight and extremely erect. For the rest, she had a small head, overweighted with a profusion of bright-brown hair; a rather childish face under a little golden-brown hat, guiltless of trimming, but for the two brown wings set one on each side, rather far back. "The kind of hat," Napier pointed out afterward, "that Phidias gave to Mercury. Cheek for a girl to wear a hat like that!"

Even under her manifest excitement, the delicate oval of the girl's face showed only a faint tinge of color. Miss von Schwarzenberg's round cheeks were richest carmine.

"Surely you 've finished!" Napier heard Miss Greta say.

"Do you think I have?" The girl's eyes left the approaching figures to reflect an even greater interest upon a plate of sugared cakes. When she had tasted one she smiled, and turned to look again where all the rest were looking. "Oh, my!" she said, "what funny dawgs!"

The hall was already a hive of excitement. Bobby and Madge bolted out as one, with cries of rapture. Lady McIntyre, hardly less pleased, prepared to follow with Julian. Napier sauntered slowly after them.

The elder Pforzheim entered with his brisk ceremoniousness and bowed low over Lady McIntyre's hand.

"My father has sent you those Russian boar-hounds he promised. Ernst has got them outside." He stood back in that empressé way of his that seemed to say, "My manners are far too perfect not to suffer others to precede." And the others, in the careless English way, did precede. They even blocked up the entrance, leaving Mr. Carl and his politeness in the rear. This manoeuver so obstructed the view that Miss Ellis rose and came a few paces nearer, hoping for a better sight of those exciting animals. Napier, glancing back, saw that Miss von Schwarzenberg, so eager for a move a moment ago, sat perfectly still.

sight of Miss von Schwarzenberg's face she stopped short.

"I think you are making some mistake," said Mr. Ernst, trying to get past the congestion first on one side and then on the other.

"Oh, no, I 'm not," that terribly carrying voice went on. "It 's because Greta has told me such a great deal about you-"

"Pardon!" He dodged first to the right and then to the left, like an untrained dog trying to get past you out of a gate.

"And you 're exactly like your picture, down to the cleft in your chin-" The girl hesitated again as Greta mumbled, and Pforzheim, with a desperate, "I must help my brother," forgot all his fine manners and pushed his way out.

"What's the matter, dearest? Ought n't I to have said that?" Then in a halfwhisper: "I never mentioned Ernst. And, after all, it was only Ernst that you" "Will you be quiet?"

In another ten seconds they were whirling away in the car.

Napier walked half-way home with Grant as usual. He was amused at Julian's indignation over Miss von Schwarzenberg's patronage of her "little friend." He was amused, too, at recalling Greta's elegant disgust at the way the girl "wolfed down" the cakes. Julian

And then they quarreled a little over Napier's decision that it was cheek for a girl to come "winged like Mercury." Julian defended her. He'd never seen a hat he liked better. It just suited that face of hers.

""That face'"! Napier mocked. "I suppose out of pure contentiousness you 'll be saying it's pretty."

"Pretty! Pretty faces are cheap. That one has got the fineness of a wood anemone and the faith of a St. Francis. Did you ever see such faith in any pair of eyes? Ye gods! if I could believe in life as that child does, if I were as serenely sure of everybody's good-will-" he threw out his walking-stick at the prison wall be