she placed her hand in his, as
lifelong training in the stiff formalities of life had made him, in
his embarrassment, while he told his great devotion to her! Thinking
back along the path of years that led to that bright garden, how Herr
Kreutzer smiled!

"How beautiful that sounds!" said Anna, softly. "'For this so great
honor, I thank you, and I give you in return my heart and hand.'"

It brought the old flute-player back from the far garden.

"Do not practice on it yet," he said, without unkindness, but with a
firm tone which gave his words almost the stern significance of a real
order. "There is no hurry, liebschen, but, when the time is ripe for
it, ah, it will come. Yah; it will come."

Her thoughts were full of all this talk of love and marriage as she
went to Mrs. Vanderlyn's next morning, to take up again her routine of
companion and instructor to the lady in the German language. She was
not so very fond of Mrs. Vanderlyn. That lady was too much absorbed in
her ambition to gain real importance in the social world to leave much
time for being lovable to anybody but her son. That she was fond of
him no one could doubt, but he was winning his own way, and did not
need her mother care. It left her free for other things; it made the
other things essential to her happiness. How empty is a mother's life
when from it, out into the world, her only son goes venturing, none
but a mother knows. Mrs. Vanderlyn had striven to fill hers with
social episodes and had not done so to her satisfaction. There were
things, she had discovered, which money, by itself, cannot accomplish
and the learning had astonished her. She had thought a golden key
would certainly unlock all gates. It had come to her as inspiration
that the easy way for an American to gain social favor in New York,
where, hitherto, gates have been closed to her, might be to purchase
social favor, first, in England or in Germany and then come back with
the distinction of it clinging like a perfume to her garments. But the
purchase had not been an easy matter. Abroad, to her amazement, money
had its mighty value, but only as a superstructure. There must be
firmer stuff for the foundation--family. Her family was traced too
easily--for the tracing was too brief. It ended with abruptness which
was startling, two generations back, in a far western mining camp.
Beyond that all the cutest experts in false genealogies had failed to
carry it convincingly.

"Anna," she s