over's indefinite power of blinding himself to what is
before his eyes, he believed that if she had been more diffident of him,
more uneasy in his presence, he should have had more courage; but for
her to breakfast unafraid with him, to meet him at lunch and dinner in
the little dining-room where they were often the only guests, and always
the only English-speaking guests, was nothing less than prohibitive.

In the hotel service there was one of those men who are porters in this
world, but will be angels in the next, unless the perfect goodness
of their looks, the constant kindness of their acts, belies them. The
Marches had known and loved the man in their brief stay, and he had been
the fast friend of Burnamy from the moment they first saw each other at
the station. He had tenderly taken possession of General Triscoe on
his arrival, and had constituted himself the nurse and keeper of the
irascible invalid, in the intervals of going to the trains, with a
zeal that often relieved his daughter and Burnamy. The general in fact
preferred him to either, and a tacit custom grew up by which when August
knocked at his door, and offered himself in his few words of serviceable
English, that one of them who happened to be sitting with the general
gave way, and left him in charge. The retiring watcher was then apt to
encounter the other watcher on the stairs, or in the reading-room, or in
the tiny, white-pebbled door-yard at a little table in the shade of
the wooden-tubbed evergreens. From the habit of doing this they one day
suddenly formed the habit of going across the street to that gardened
hollow before and below the Grand-Ducal Museum. There was here a
bench in the shelter of some late-flowering bush which the few other
frequenters of the place soon recognized as belonging to the young
strangers, so that they would silently rise and leave it to them when
they saw them coming. Apparently they yielded not only to their right,
but to a certain authority which resides in lovers, and which all other
men, and especially all other women, like to acknowledge and respect.

In the absence of any civic documents bearing upon the affair it is
difficult to establish the fact that this was the character in which
Agatha and Burnamy were commonly regarded by the inhabitants of Weimar.
But whatever their own notion of their relation was, if it was not that
of a Brant and a Brautigam, the people of Weimar would have been puzzled
to say what i