right for her
to be good friends with one who wished to be so kind to him and her!
An hour passed most delightfully in that earnest conversation about
little which engages young folk of their age and suffering from the
complaint which ailed them both.

"But I really had a solemn, sober errand to attend to when I came," he
said, at length. "My mother fell in love with you." (He wished he
might have told her that her son had, also.) "She is anxious to see
more of you." (He did not tell her that the reason was his mother's
firm conviction that her father certainly was a distinguished person
in hard luck, incog.) "This summer, while she was in Europe, she found
that she was sadly handicapped by knowing almost nothing of the German
language. She wants to know if you won't come to her and teach her.
You could also be her friend, you know; a sort of young companion to a
lonely woman." He was making it sound as attractive as he could. He
had devised the scheme with earnest care, had brought his mother round
to eagerness for it with cautious difficulty, and now presented it
with diffidence and fear to the delightful girl he loved.

"I teach?" said Anna, delighted by the thought of being able, thus, to
help her father, and, at the same time, not utterly averse to anything
which would make frequent glimpses of her knight-errant an easy
certainty. "I don't know if I _could_ teach."

"Why, it's a cinch," said the enthusiastic lover. "I don't think she
will be slow to learn. She'll work hard, mother will; she didn't like
this summer's trip too well. The crowned-heads didn't tip their crowns
and bow as she went by."

"You are mistake," said Anna gravely. "Kings do not wear their crowns
upon the streets."

He laughed. "You see how much we've got to learn?" he asked. "May I
tell my mother that you'll come?"

"I shall ask my father," Anna answered.

Reluctantly, after a week, Herr Kreutzer gave consent. He was afraid
he might not hold the place in the beer-garden. He hated the cheap
rag-time music which the man insisted on and had held his temper with
much difficulty, when he had been reproved for playing "hymns" because
he had, for solos, interspersed a worthy number now and then. With his
tenure of that place uncertain, not sure that he could find another,
he felt that he would have no right to interpose too serious
objections to the highly flattering arrangement Mrs. Vanderlyn
proposed. His worry about Vanderlyn subsided, som