Blomberg! I will gladly help you bear them as
your loyal son-in-law."

"So that's the way of it," was the captain's answer, his honest eyes
betraying more surprise than pleasure.

Yet he pledged Wolf, and, touching his glass to his, said:

"I've often thought that this might happen if you should see how she has
grown up. If she consents, nothing could please me better; but how many
lovers she has already encouraged, and then, before matters became
serious, dismissed! I have experienced it. If you succeed in putting an
end to such trifling, may this hour be blessed! But do you know the huge
maggots she keeps under her golden hair?"

"Both large and small ones," cried Wolf, with glowing cheeks. "Truthful
as she is, she did not conceal from the playmate of her youth a single
impulse of her ambitious soul."

"And did she give you hope?" asked the captain, thrusting his head
eagerly forward.

"Yes," replied the youth firmly; but he quickly corrected himself, and,
in a less confident tone, added, "That is, if I could offer her a
care-free life."

"There it is," sighed the old man. "She knows what she wants, and holds
firmly to it. You are the son of a knight, and on account of the music
which you can pursue together--With her everything is possible and little
is impossible. In any case, you will have no easy life with her, and, ere
you order the wedding ring----" Here he suddenly stopped, for a
bird-song, high, clear, and yet as insinuatingly sweet as though, on this
evening in late April, the merriest and most skilful feathered songsters
which had recently found their way home to the fresh green leafage on the
shore of the Danube had made an appointment on the steps of the gloomy
house in Red Cock Street, rose nearer and nearer to the two men who were
sitting over their wine.

It was difficult to believe that this whistling and chirping, trilling
and cuckoo calling, came from the same throat; but when the bird notes
ceased just outside the door, and Barbara, with bright mirthfulness and
the airiest grace, sang the refrain of the Chant des Oiseaux, 'Car la
saison est bonne', bowing gracefully meanwhile, the old enemy of the
Turks fairly beamed with delight.

His eyes, wet with tears of grateful joy, sought the young man's, and,
though he had just warned him plainly enough against courting his
daughter, his sparkling gaze now asked whether he had ever met an equally
bewitching marvel.

"The deuce!" he cried out to