got?"

"For board and lodging," she said; and her merry heart-shaped face with
its round brown eyes looked up rather challengingly at the old soldier.

"The devil!" he cried.

"What's the matter with you?" said Frau Kummerfelden. "It's a very good
thing that Providence has sent a couple of decent, sensible men into
this part of the town, or how should the poor thing live?"

The captain laughed a little awkwardly. When she had gone, he got up
stiffly from the table and walked about the room. "That boarder
business doesn't please me at all," he said crossly.

"Look at the man!" laughed Frau Kummerfelden. "Captain, you needn't
worry yourself. She's so clever that you have no thread fine enough to
thread her needle."

From that day neither the captain nor the little widow was ever
missing from Frau Kummerfelden's on Sunday afternoon, until it got too
much for the old lady. It was some time before she began to notice that
the captain and the young woman were getting to be on terms of
courtship.

"Lord," she said within herself, "Thou hast chosen to ordain that my
eyes should never see a man who couldn't get a woman, a man whom no
woman would look at. Amen."

When she finally became aware of what was going on, she began to make
excursions into the country on Sunday afternoons. She took her
sewing-bag, put on a big hat over her cap, dressed herself in a
becoming flowered dress, and locked the door of the house in the Entenfang
behind her. Then she went off to contemplate God's free nature, picking
up on the way a few rolls at the baker's, so that she might have
something to dip in her coffee at Roedchen, Troebsdorf, or Suessenborn.

"Well," she said to herself, "we've got 'Tubby' to the point where she
doesn't need a stepmother; it's quite unnecessary that she should have
one at all, least of all Frau Marianne. I believe in giving every one
their due--but I wouldn't risk a penny on betting that her heart is
even as big as an old hen's that you make soup out of. I really don't
see any reason why we should provide her with a sinecure up on the
Ettersberg."

The first Sunday or two that the captain found the door locked, he was
very much annoyed with Frau Kummerfelden. "An old woman like that," he
growled in front of the door, "steals God's days from him--and just
when there's some use to be got out of her, she's off!"

So far the captain's love had been easy and comfortable to bear, a
smooth and happy love. But no