the ill-doer's consciousness. To find out that you are not so good or
generous or magnanimous as you thought is, next to having other people
find it out, probably the unfriendliest discovery that can be made. But
I suppose it has its uses. Colonel Kenton now saw the unhandsomeness of
his leaving his wife at all, and he beheld in its true light his
shabbiness in not going back to tell her he had found his old friend and
was to bring him to dinner. The Lohndiener would of course have taken
him straight to his hotel, and he would have been spared this shameful
exposure, which, he knew well enough, Davis would never forget, but
would tell all his life with an ever-increasing garniture of fiction. He
cursed his weakness in allowing himself to dawdle about those arsenals
and that parade-ground, and to be so far misguided by a hardened
bachelor as to admire certain yellow-haired German and black-haired
Hungarian women on the promenade; when he came to think of going out in
that sledge, it was with anathema maranatha. He groaned in spirit, but
he owned that he was rightly punished, though it seemed hard that his
wife should be punished too. And then he went on miserably to figure
first her slight surprise at his being gone so long; then her vague
uneasiness and her conjectures; then her dawning apprehensions and her
helplessness; her probable sending to the consulate to find out what had
become of him; her dismay at learning nothing of him there; her waiting
and waiting in wild dismay as the moments and hours went by; her
frenzied running to the door at every step and her despair when it
proved not his. He had seen her suffering from less causes. And where
was she? In what low, shabby tavern had he left her? He choked with rage
and grief, and could hardly speak to the gentleman, a naturalized
fellow-citizen of Vienna, to whom he found the consul introducing him.

"I wonder if you can't help us," said the consul. "My friend here is the
victim of a curious annoyance;" and he stated the case in language so
sympathetic and decorous as to restore some small shreds of the
colonel's self-respect.

"Ah," said their new acquaintance, who was mercifully not a man of
humor, or too polite to seem so, "that's another trick of those scamps
of fiacre-drivers. He took you purposely to the wrong hotel, and was
probably feed by the landlord for bringing you. But why should you make
yourselves so much trouble? You know Colonel Kenton's landlord h