message,
which the footman delivered without any suspicion that the view in
question meant the view of Heine himself. But then that admirable
menial had not the advantage of her comprehensive familiarity with
Heine's writings. She crossed the blank stony courtyard and curled up
the curving five flights, her mind astir with pictures and emotions.

She had scribbled on her card a reminder of her identity; but could he
remember, after all those years, and in his grievous sickness, the
little girl of eleven who had sat next to him at the Boulogne _table
d'hote_? And she herself could now scarcely realize at times that the
stout, good-natured, short-sighted little man with the big white brow,
who had lounged with her daily at the end of the pier, telling her
stories, was the most mordant wit in Europe, "the German
Aristophanes"; and that those nursery tales, grotesquely compact of
mermaids, water-sprites, and a funny old French fiddler with a poodle
that diligently took three baths a day, were the frolicsome
improvisations of perhaps the greatest lyric poet of his age. She
recalled their parting: "When you go back to England, you can tell
your friends that you have seen Heinrich Heine!"

To which the little girl: "And who is Heinrich Heine?"

A query which had set the blue-eyed little man roaring with laughter.

These things might be vivid still to her vision: they colored all she
had read since from his magic pen--the wonderful poems interpreting
with equal magic the romance of strange lands and times, or the modern
soul, naked and unashamed, as if clothed in its own complexity; the
humorous-tragic questionings of the universe; the delicious
travel-pictures and fantasies; the lucid criticisms of art, and
politics, and philosophy, informed with malicious wisdom, shimmering
with poetry and wit. But, as for him, doubtless she and her ingenuous
interrogation had long since faded from his tumultuous life.

The odors of the sick-room recalled her to the disagreeable present.
In the sombre light she stumbled against a screen covered with paper
painted to look like lacquer-work, and, as the slip-shod old nurse in
her _serre-tete_ motioned her forward, she had a dismal sense of a
lodging-house interior, a bourgeois barrenness enhanced by two
engravings after Leopold Robert, depressingly alien from that dainty
boudoir atmosphere of the artist-life she knew.

But this sordid impression was swallowed up in the vast tragedy behind