across the wide Potomac.

"We are foreigners," she went on, "as you can tell. I speak your
language better than my father does, because I was younger when I
learned. It is quite true he is my father. He is an Austrian nobleman,
of one of the old families. He was educated in Germany, and of late has
lived there."

"I could have told most of that of you both," I said.

She bowed and resumed:

"My father was always a student. As a young man in the university, he
was devoted to certain theories of his own. _N'est-ce pas vrai, mon
drole?_" she asked, turning to put her arm on her father's shoulder as
he dropped weakly on the couch beside her.

He nodded. "Yes, I wass student," he said. "I wass not content with the
ways of my people."

"So, my father, you will see," said she, smiling at him, "being much
determined on anything which he attempted, decided, with five others, to
make a certain experiment. It was the strangest experiment, I presume,
ever made in the interest of what is called science. It was wholly the
most curious and the most cruel thing ever done."

She hesitated now. All I could do was to look from one to the other,
wonderingly.

"This dear old dreamer, my father, then, and five others--"

"I name them!" he interrupted. "There were Karl von Goertz, Albrecht
Hardman, Adolph zu Sternbern, Karl von Starnack, and Rudolph von
Wardberg. We were all friends--"

"Yes," she said softly, "all friends, and all fools. Sometimes I think
of my mother."

"My dear, your mother!"

"But I must tell this as it was! Then, sir, these six, all Heidelberg
men, all well born, men of fortune, all men devoted to science, and
interested in the study of the hopelessness of the average human being
in Central Europe--these fools, or heroes, I say not which--they decided
to do something in the interest of science. They were of the belief that
human beings were becoming poor in type. So they determined to marry--"

"Naturally," said I, seeking to relieve a delicate situation--"they
scorned the marriage of convenience--they came to our American way of
thinking, that they would marry for love."

"You do them too much credit!" said she slowly. "That would have meant
no sacrifice on either side. They married in the interest of _science!_
They married with the deliberate intention of improving individuals of
the human species! Father, is it not so?"

Some speech stumbled on his tongue; but she raised her hand. "Listen to
me. I