tle artist had not accompanied
him upstairs, he wanted to deliver a few engraved blocks to the person
who had ordered them. The stately, fair-haired woman must have been
remarkably pretty in by-gone years, and even now, though considerably
over forty, her bright eyes and white teeth possessed a youthful charm,
especially when she laughed. She was sitting with five or six
seamtresses among mountains of calico and linen, from which she was
cutting children's dresses and underclothes. She received her visitor
like an expected guest, and ushered him into a smaller apartment, her
real home, as she called it, which was fitted up with a writing table,
book cases, a flower stand, and all sorts of pretty trifles. Over the
sofa hung the portrait of a hypochondriacal rascal looking man with
grey hair, from whose wrinkled brow and compressed lips it was easy to
perceive that the care of his digestion had been the principal
occupation of his life.

"My late husband," said the lady, as if introducing Edwin and the
picture to each other. "I have been a widow ten years, but you will
find everything here just as it was in his life time, this room (she
opened a door to allow Edwin to look in) was his study, and contains
his whole library, though as he was a mathematician, I can read none of
his books. But they were his pets and his pride, and I think that
picture would fall from the wall if one should ever get into a
stranger's hands. If I had my way, the sooner I got the horrible things
out of the house the better I should like it. They cost me tears enough
when he could use them."

"Tears?"

"Yes, Herr Doctor, you're a learned man too, I hope you will do better
some day and not say like my late husband: 'first my books, and then my
wife.' And yet he married me for love and not mathematics. But after
two or three years, although I had not grown exactly ugly, he found
those horrid triangles and hexangles, and the queer plus and minus
signs, far more attractive than the blue eyes and round cheeks of his
young wife. Well, I do not complain, I had foreseen it and knew what I
was doing."

"But aside from this jealousy, which you share with so many women, you
must have enjoyed a great deal of happiness in these rooms, or you
would not have so religiously kept them in the same condition."

The widow looked at him with a searching side glance, as if she wanted
to ascertain whether he was not too young to be trusted with any
confidential