ions had
been removed, and the court-yard where the hired coach and pair of the
prince had rolled in the evening before had only a few majestic ducks
waddling about in it and quacking together, indifferent to the presence
of a yellow mail-wagon, on which the driver had been apparently dozing
till the hour of noon should sound. He sat there immovable, but at the
last stroke of the clock he woke up and drove vigorously away to the
station.

The dining-room which they had been kept out of by the prince the night
before was not such as to embitter the sense of their wrong by its
splendor. After all, the tastes of royalty must be simple, if the prince
might have gone to the Schloss and had chosen rather to stay at this
modest hotel; but perhaps the Schloss was reserved for more immediate
royalty than the brothers of prince-regents; and in that case he could
not have done better than dine at the Golden Star. If he paid no more
than two marks, he dined as cheaply as a prince could wish, and as
abundantly. The wine at Ansbach was rather thin and sour, but the bread,
March declared, was the best bread in the whole world, not excepting the
bread of Carlsbad.

After dinner the Marches had some of the local pastry, not so
incomparable as the bread, with their coffee, which they had served them
in a pavilion of the beautiful garden remaining to the hotel from the
time when it was a patrician mansion. The garden had roses in it
and several sorts of late summer flowers, as well as ripe cherries,
currants, grapes, and a Virginia-creeper red with autumn, all
harmoniously contemporaneous, as they might easily be in a climate where
no one of the seasons can very well know itself from the others. It had
not been raining for half an hour, and the sun was scalding hot, so
that the shelter of their roof was very grateful, and the puddles of
the paths were drying up with the haste which puddles have to make in
Germany, between rains, if they are ever going to dry up at all.

The landlord came out to see if they were well served, and he was
sincerely obliging in the English he had learned as a waiter in London.
Mrs. March made haste to ask him if a young American of the name of
Burnamy had been staying with him a few weeks before; and she described
Burnamy's beauty and amiability so vividly that the landlord, if he had
been a woman, could not have failed to remember him. But he failed, with
a real grief, apparently, and certainly a real poli