e ruefully. "Well, at any rate, I should like to know
how Miss Triscoe would have affected them."

"I should much rather know what sort of life that English woman is
living here with her German husband; I fancied she had married rank. I
could imagine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town, from the
way she clung to her Illustrated News, and explained the pictures of the
royalties to her friend. There is romance for you!"

They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after their five hours'
journey, and as in a spell of their travelled youth they drove up
through the academic old town, asleep under its dimly clouded sky, and
silent except for the trolley-cars that prowled its streets with their
feline purr, and broke at times into a long, shrill caterwaul. A sense
of the past imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier
and the head waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to
the endeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms
in the house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they found
themselves in great comfort, with electric lights and bells, and a quick
succession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them.
The spell was deepened by the fact, which March kept at the bottom of
his consciousness for the present, that one of their trunks was missing.
This linked him more closely to the travel of other days, and he spent
the next forenoon in a telegraphic search for the estray, with emotions
tinged by the melancholy of recollection, but in the security that
since it was somewhere in the keeping of the state railway, it would be
finally restored to him.

XXIII.

Their windows, as they saw in the morning, looked into a large square
of aristocratic physiognomy, and of a Parisian effect in architecture,
which afterwards proved characteristic of the town, if not quite so
characteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsic for calling itself
Little Paris. The prevailing tone was of a gray tending to the pale
yellow of the Tauchnitz editions with which the place is more familiarly
associated in the minds of English-speaking travellers. It was rather
more sombre than it might have been if the weather had been fair; but
a quiet rain was falling dreamily that morning, and the square was
provided with a fountain which continued to dribble in the rare moments
when the rain forgot itself. The place was better shaded than need be
in that sunl