ing eagerly down the street. As the three
friends stopped at the door the head disappeared, and the curtain fell
back again into its place.

CHAPTER VI.

AN IDYLL.

The feverish pulse of a city is not felt in the same degree in all
parts of it. There are places from which all circulation seems shut
out, and where the rapid stream of life hardly shows a ripple. Quiet
houses are there, only separated from the noisy street by the thickness
of a wall. They seem to be many miles from the heated movement of life,
and their inhabitants complacently gaze from their windows with the
same unconcern as they would look at a picture on their own walls--a
view perhaps of violence or excitement, a storm at sea, or a battle.

The Markers' house in the Lutzowstrasse was just such a peaceful island
in the tossing sea of the city. It was only a few steps from the
Magdeburger Platz--the first story in a stately house with a round arch
over the door. Three generations of women--grandmother, mother, and
daughter--lived there, without a single man to take care of them,
attended only by an old widowed cook and her daughter, who had grown up
into the position of a waiting maid. A dreamy, monotonous life they
lived here, like that of the sleepers in the palace of the Sleeping
Beauty behind their hundred-year-old hedge of thorns.

The grandmother was the head of the house--Frau Brohl, a lady of over
sixty years, and a widow for the last twenty. She was a small thin
woman, her figure very much bent, with snow-white hair, a narrow, pale
face, and pretty brown eyes. She moved slowly and with great exertion,
spoke softly and with shortness of breath, and seemed weary and sad.
She looked as if she had some hidden sickness, and as if her feeble
lamp of life might soon flicker out. As a matter of fact she had never
had a day's illness; her appearance gave the impression of weakness,
and increasing age made her neither better nor worse. Even now she was
the first to rise in the morning and the last to go to bed; had the
best appetite at table; and, in her occasional walks, was the least
tired.

Her late husband--Herr F. A. Brohl, of the firm of Brohl, Son &
Co.--had been one of the largest ship-brokers in Stettin. They had
lived together for a quarter of a century in peace and happiness, and
her eyes filled with tears when she remembered that part of her life.
It was a beautiful time, much too good for a sinful human being. They
had a hou