n of this little episode haunted him. So much
pre-occupied was he at the club that he actually played out the
thirteenth trump upon his partner's long suit and so sacrificed the
game--being the first and only time that he was ever known to throw away
a point. He told Von Baumser all about it when he came back.

"She's a demned foine-looking woman, whoever she may be," he remarked,
at they sat together before turning in. "Be George! she's the foinest
woman I've seen for a long time."

"She's a window," said the German.

"A what?"

"A window--the window of an engineer."

"Is it a widow you mane? What d'ye know about her? What's her name,
and where does she come from?"

"I have heard from the slavey that a win--a widow lives over dere in
those rooms. She boards mit Madame Morrison, and that window belongs to
her privacy zimmer--dat is, chamber. As to her name, I have not heard
it, or else I disremember it."

"Ged!" said the major, "she'd eyes that looked right through ye, and a
figure like Juno."

"She's vierzig if she's a day--dat is, forty," Von Baumser remarked.

"Well, if she is, me boy, a woman of forty is just in the proime o'
loife. If you'd seen her at the window, she would have taken ye by
storm. She stands like this, and she looks up like this, and then down
in this way." The major pursed up his warlike features into what he
imagined to be an innocent and captivating expression. Then she looks
across and sees me, and down go the lids of her eyes, like the shutting
off of a bull's-eye lantern. Then she blushed and stole just one more
glance at me round the corner of the curtain. She had two peeps, the
divil a doubt of it."

"Dat is very good," the German said encouragingly.

"Ah, me boy, twinty years ago, when I was forty inches round the chest
and thirty-three round the waist, I was worth looking at twice.
Bedad, when a man gets ould and lonely he sees what a fool he was not to
make better use of his time when he'd the chance."

"Mein Gott!" cried Von Baumser. "You don't mean to say that you would
marry suppose you had the chance?"

"I don't know," the major answered reflectively.

"The vomens is not to be trusted," the German said sadly. "I knew a
voman in my own country which was the daughter of a man dat kept a
hotel--and she and I was promised to be married to each others.
Karl Hagelstein, he was to be vat you call my best man. A very handsome
man was Karl, and I sent him oft