ught of the dull ball on the evening of Apollonius' arrival.

She was sitting in the garden sewing while the old gentleman dreamt
his heavy midday dreams. She felt so peculiarly happy at home. Her
boys were playing at her feet, as quietly as if the old gentleman had
been present, or no, not like that, for if he had been in the little
garden they would not have dared to go in there at all. The little
girl had thrown her arms round her mother, who seemed herself to be
still a girl, so chaste did she appear. Now the child raised her
little head with old-fashioned earnestness, looked meditatively at her
mother and said: "Whatever can be the reason?"

[Illustration: SCHNORR VON CAROLSFELD DAVID BEING STONED BY SINAI]

"Reason of what?" asked her mother.

"Whenever you have been with us and then go away, he looks after you
so sadly."

"Who?" asked her mother.

"Why, Uncle Apollonius. Who else could it be? Did you scold him, or
slap him as you do me when I take sugar without asking? You must have
done something to him, or he wouldn't be so sorry."

The little girl went on chattering and soon forgot her uncle over a
butterfly. Not so her mother. She no longer heard what the child said.
What a queer feeling was this that had come over her, happy and
unhappy at the same time! She had let her needle fall without noticing
it. Was she startled? It seemed to her that she was startled, much as
she would have been if she had been speaking to some one and suddenly
realized that it was not the person she thought. She had thought that
Apollonius wanted to insult her, and now the child told her that she
had insulted him. She looked up and saw Apollonius coming from the
shed toward the house. At the same moment another man stood between
her and him as if he had grown up out of the earth. It was Fritz
Nettenmair. She had not heard him approaching.

After putting an indifferent question he went on with strange haste to
speak of the "dull ball." He repeated what people had said about it,
told her how offended every one felt that Apollonius had not asked her
for a dance, not even for the first one. It was curious that when he
reminded her of it now she felt it more keenly than ever; but not with
anger, only with sad pain. She did not say so; she did not need to.
Fritz Nettenmair was like a man in a magnetic sleep; from the leaf of
a tree, from a picket in the fence, from a white wall he read, with
closed eyes, what his wife felt.

"W