that the
grenadier was out of the question. Her lips quivered, but she maintained
a tolerable composure.

"You should not say that about--about the lanky boy, Augustin," said
she. "We all liked him, I liked him."

"Well, he deserved it a little better then than now. Yet perhaps, since
the grenadier----"

"I don't understand what you mean about the grenadier."

"Yes, don't you?" I asked with a smile. "No dreams, Elsa, that you told
to nobody?"

She flushed for a moment, then she smiled. Her smiling heartened me, and
I went on in lighter vein.

"One can never be sure of being miserable," I said.

"No," she murmured softly, raising her eyes a moment to mine. The glance
was brief, but hinted a coquetry whose natural play would have
delighted--well, the grenadier.

She seemed very pretty, sitting there in the half-shade, with the sun
catching her fair hair. I stood looking down on her; presently her eyes
rose to mine.

"Not of being absolutely miserable," said I.

"You wouldn't make anybody miserable. You're kind. Aren't you kind?"

She grew grave as she put her question. I made her no answer in words; I
bent down, took her hand, and kissed it. I held it, and she did not draw
it away. I looked in her eyes; there I saw the alarm and the shrinking
that I had expected. But to my wonder I seemed to see something else.
There was excitement, a sparkle witnessed to it; I should scarcely be
wrong if I called it triumph. I was suddenly struck with the idea that I
had read my feelings into her too completely. It might be an
exaggeration to say that she wished to marry me, but was there not
something in her that found satisfaction in the thought of marrying me?
I remembered with a new clearness how the little girl who rolled down
the hill had thought that she would like to be a queen. At that moment
this new idea of her brought me pure relief. I suppose there were
obvious moralizings to be done; it was also possible to take the matter
to heart, as a tribute to my position at the cost of myself. I felt no
soreness, and I did no moralizing. I was honestly and fully glad that
for any reason under heaven she wished to marry me.

Moreover this touch of a not repulsive worldliness in her sapped some of
my scruples. What I was doing no longer seemed sacrilege. She had one
foot on earth already then, this pretty Elsa, lightly poised perhaps,
and quite ethereal, yet in the end resting on this common earth of ours.
She would get