Professors and instructors, were sorry if he didn't like it, but they
were ordered by their Government and paid by their Government to impart
this information; they had contracted with Herr Harrison to impart it to
his son Michael for so long as he could endure it, and they imparted it
with all their might.

Michael rather liked the Germans of Aschaffenburg. Instead of despising
him because he would never make a timber-merchant or a tree expert, they
admired and respected him because he was a poet. The family he lived
with, Herr Henschel and Frau Henschel, and his fellow-boarders, Carl and
Otto Kraus, and young Ludwig Henschel, and Hedwig and Loettchen admired
and respected him because he was a poet. When he walked with Ludwig in
the great forests Michael chanted his poems, both in English and in
German, till Ludwig's soul was full of yearning and a delicious sorrow,
so that Ludwig actually shed tears in the forest. He said that if he had
not done so he would have burst. Ludwig's emotions had nothing whatever
to do with the forest or with Michael's poems, but he thought they had.

Michael knew that his only chance of getting out of Germany was to show
an unsurpassable incompetence. He showed it. He flourished his
incompetence in the faces of all the officials, until some superofficial
wrote a letter to his father that gave him his liberty.

The Henschels were sorry when he left. The students, Otto and Carl and
Ludwig, implored him not to forget them. Hedwig and Loettchen cried.

* * * * *

Michael was not pleased when he found that he was to go home by Dresden
to bring Veronica back. He wanted to be alone on the journey. He wanted
to stop in Paris and see Jules Reveillaud. He was afraid that Ronny had
grown into a tiresome flapper and that he would have to talk to her.

And he found that Ronny had skipped the tiresome stage and had grown up.
Only her school clothes and her girlish door-knocker plait tied up with
broad black ribbon reminded him that she was not yet seventeen.

Ronny was tired. She did not want to talk. When he had tucked her up
with railway rugs in her corner of the carriage she sat still with her
hands in her muff.

"I shall not disturb your thoughts, Michael," she said.

She knew what he had been thinking. Her clear eyes gazed at him out of
her dead white face with an awful look of spiritual maturity.

"What can have happened to her?" he wondered.

But she di