d briefly, and her enunciation was clear and very
distinct.

He heard.

Chapter Two

There was at that particular date a man in Dusseldorf who was quite as
set in his ideas as Rosina was in hers. He was lingering from day to day
at the Hotel Heck, engaged for the most part in no more arduous pursuit
than the awaiting of a telegram from his family. His family were at
Evian, on the Lac de Geneve, and if they decided to go from there to
Paris, he wanted very much to visit Switzerland himself. But if, on the
contrary, they merely ended in transferring their abode from Evian to
Ouchy, as was very likely to prove to be the case, he had fully made up
his mind to pass the early summer months in Leipsic. In Leipsic he had
an interest--the one great interest of his existence. The family had but
scant sympathy with the force of the Leipsic attraction; their ambitions
were set in quite another direction, and all their hopes and plans and
wishes were bent to the accomplishment of that one end. They desired
most ardently that he should take unto himself a wife, because he was
the last of his race, and there was a coronet hung up in the skies
above his head. The natural effect of such anxiety upon the uncommon
temperament of this particularly uncommon man was to decide him
definitely to remain single forever, and because he had always proved
himself of a strength of resolve and firmness of purpose quite
unequalled in their experience, they felt justified in the gravest fears
that in this case, as in all others, he would remain steadfast, keeping
the word which he declared that he had solemnly pledged himself, and so
become the last of a line whose castle had crowned the crag which it
defended since the Goth was abroad in the land.

To be sure, he was not yet so old but that, when he casually glanced at
a girl, the girl, her mother, and his mother all immediately held their
breath. But he was old enough to have proved the futility of the hope by
the casualty of the glance over and over again. And so his people were
completely out of patience with him, and he and they found it
accordingly more agreeable to take even their Switzerland in individual
communion-cups. Therefore he remained in Dusseldorf, wandering in the
Hofgarten, listening to the music in the Tonhalle, and occasionally
quieting his impatience for the Lake of Lucerne, where his childhood had
been passed, by writing a few pages to Leipsic, the scene of his
studi