ir ideal of the American woman; and even she would have
had to have been here thirty years ago."

She laughed a little ruefully. "Well, at any rate, I should like to know
how Miss Triscoe would have affected them."

"I should much rather know what sort of life that English woman is living
here with her German husband; I fancied she had married rank. I could
imagine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town, from the way she
clung to her Illustrated News, and explained the pictures of the
royalties to her friend. There is romance for you!"

They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after their five hours'
journey, and as in a spell of their travelled youth they drove up through
the academic old town, asleep under its dimly clouded sky, and silent
except for the trolley-cars that prowled its streets with their feline
purr, and broke at times into a long, shrill caterwaul. A sense of the
past imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier and the
head waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to the
endeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms in
the house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they found
themselves in great comfort, with electric lights and bells, and a quick
succession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them. The
spell was deepened by the fact, which March kept at the bottom of his
consciousness for the present, that one of their trunks was missing. This
linked him more closely to the travel of other days, and he spent the
next forenoon in a telegraphic search for the estray, with emotions
tinged by the melancholy of recollection, but in the security that since
it was somewhere in the keeping of the state railway, it would be finally
restored to him.

XXIII.

Their windows, as they saw in the morning, looked into a large square of
aristocratic physiognomy, and of a Parisian effect in architecture, which
afterwards proved characteristic of the town, if not quite so
characteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsic for calling itself
Little Paris. The prevailing tone was of a gray tending to the pale
yellow of the Tauchnitz editions with which the place is more familiarly
associated in the minds of English-speaking travellers. It was rather
more sombre than it might have been if the weather had been fair; but a
quiet rain was falling dreamily that morning, and the square was provided
with a fountain which conti