happily, their knot was cut for him. Von Tielitz, who had long been
away, broke in upon the household one morning with glorious news. He
had received a commission as bandmaster in the army with fair pay.
Most unexpected. A civilian, who could make sport of the military,
summoned into the ranks! What could it mean? Something must be in
the wind.

At all events he had come to arrange to marry Elsa, and converted
the Villa into a hubbub. He was so beside himself that he appeared
ready to embrace and marry the first person he met. He was also
officious as if conducting a rehearsal. He rushed to Gard's room and
overwhelmed him with the tidings. His eye-glasses kept tumbling off.
He was upstairs and down, in the flower garden, out at the tea
table, and now and then he rushed to the Pleyel and rent the air
with its exultant chords.

The family turned the day into celebration. The wine cellar was
opened. The kitchen sent forth its hot and overflowing dishes hour
after hour until well into the evening. The marriageable Jim Deming
and Gard Kirtley were to Villa Elsa as if they had never been. Frau
proclaimed in husky sounds that she had not felt so young in thirty
years. Luckily Fraeulein Wasserhaus had gone off to Brunswick to
visit a relative soon after Deming's advent, so she was not in
Wiesenstrasse to encounter this joyous climax and Gard's
preparations for his eventful journey.

Elsa acted as one overjoyed. It was what she had yearned for and
what filled the measure of her Teutonic maiden nature. On seeing her
happy like a yellow mermaid on a sunlit, blissful shore, and knowing
what Friedrich _was_ with all his talent, Gard realized she was
never for him or he for her. It had been for him a vagary, an
irresponsible venture in ethno-psychology, a poorly based confusion
of appreciation with a vague notion of duty intermingled with
sentiment.

His illness had cleared his intuitions. The unalluring defects of
the Teuton systems of love-making overshadowed his own defects as a
suitor. Elsa had been as truly foreign to him as the German habits
of eating and drinking. In thinking of her he now knew he had always
been conscious of her nation. The German woman, as he had already
learned, is sunk into her race. It swallows up her individuality. In
marrying her, one married the whole people--the German State--the
Kaiser. One became possessed not only of a help-meet but of an
aggressive political idea.

Now that Gard was a fri