mble along in the same
house, but two mistresses never can, and Dora and Gretchen would not be
congenial. Good morning, gentlemen!' and he bowed himself from the room,
leaving Frank covered with confusion and shame as he felt that he was
beaten.

The physicians did not think it a case in which they were warranted to
interfere. Neither could conscientiously sign a certificate which should
declare Arthur a lunatic, and their advice to Frank was that he should
suffer his brother to have his own way in his own house, and when he
felt that he could not bear with his idiosyncracies he could go
elsewhere. But it was this going elsewhere which Frank did not fancy;
and, after a consultation with his wife, he decided to let matters take
their course for a time at least, or until Gretchen came, if she ever
did.

Arthur's allusion to the sums of money his brother had appropriated to
his own use had warned Frank that he was not quite so indifferent or
ignorant of his business affairs as he had seemed, and this of itself
served to keep him quiet and patient during the confusion which ensued,
as walls were torn down, and doors and windows cut, while the house was
filled with workmen, and the sound of the hammer and saw was heard from
morning till night.

It was in the middle of October when Arthur fairly commenced his
repairs, but so many men did he employ, and so rapidly was the work
pushed on, that the first of January found everything finished and
Arthur installed in his suite of rooms, which a prince might have
envied, so richly and tastefully were they fitted up. Beautiful pictures
and rich tapestry covered the walls in the first room, where the floor
was inlaid with colored woods in lovely Mosaic designs, and the centre
was covered with a costly Oriental rug, which Arthur had bought at a
fabulous price in Paris, where it had once adorned a room in the
Tuileries. But the gem of the whole was the library, where the statuary
stood in the niches, and where, from the large bow-window at the south,
a young girl's face looked upon the scene with an expression of shy
surprise and half regret in the soft blue eyes, as if their owner
wondered how she came there, and was always thinking of the fields and
forests of far-away Germany. For it was decidedly a German face of the
higher type, and such as is seldom found among the lower or even middle
classes. And yet you instinctively felt that it belonged to the latter,
notwithstanding the