cheek it would not have been noticeable.

"I have often thought about _you_." said he, musingly. "This is not the
only service you have done me; the first was at Lindau,--mayhap you have
forgotten it. You lent me two hundred florins, and, if I 'm not much
mistaken, when you were far from being rich yourself."

He leaned his head on his hand, and seemed to have fallen into a musing
fit.

"And, after all," said I, "of the best turn I ever did you, you have
never heard in your life, and, what is more, might never hear, if not
from myself. Do you remember an altercation on the road to Feldkirch,
with a man called Rigges?"

"To be sure I do; he smashed the small-bone of this arm for me; but I
gave worse than I got. They never could find that bullet I sent into
his side, and he died of it at Palermo. But what share in this did you
bear?"

"Not the worst nor the best; but I was imprisoned for a twelvemonth in
your place."

"Imprisoned for _me?_"

"Yes; they assumed that I was Harpar, and as I took no steps to
undeceive them, there I remained till they seemed to have forgotten all
about me."

Harpar questioned me closely and keenly as to the reasons that prompted
this act of mine,--an act all the more remarkable, as, to use his own
words, "We were men who had no friendship for each other, actually
strangers; and," added he, significantly, "the sort of fellows who,
somehow, do not usually 'hit it off' together. You a man of leisure,
with your own dreamy mode of life; I, a hard worker, who could not enjoy
idleness; and in this sense, far more likely to hold each other cheaply
than otherwise."

I attempted to account for this piece of devotion as best I might, but
not very successfully, since I was only endeavoring to explain what I
really did not well understand myself. Nor could a vague desire to
do something generous, merely because it _was_ generous, satisfy the
practical intelligence of him who heard me.

"Well," said he, at last, "all that machinery you have described is so
new and strange to me, I can tell nothing as to how it ought to work;
but I'm as grateful to you as a man can be for a service which he could
not have rendered _himself_, nor has the slightest notion of what could
have prompted _you_ to do. Now, let me hear by what chance you came
here?"

"You must listen to a long story to learn that," said I; and as he
declared that he had nothing more pressing to do with his time, I began,
almost as I