The greater part of Ordham’s reserve melted, as was natural, when he sprawled on the divan with his coat off on a hot day, and his hostess sat in her rocking-chair fanning herself and wearing one of those white lawn wrappers that an American woman would retain in her wardrobe were she elevated to a throne. By no means frank by temperament, he indulged in frankness as a sort of luxury where his confidence had been won; and feeling more intimate with Styr than he had ever felt with anybody, he talked to her freely about himself, his family, his hopes, desires, and sentiments toward most things, until Margarethe knew him far better than either of them realized at the time.

But he was not fond of talking about himself, nor of personalities in general. Books, the theatre, life, the mysterious back-waters of human nature, interested him far more. He always brought out his London newspaper, and being too lazy to read aloud himself, made her read to him the news of the day and the editorial comment, while he explained the relationship of the present to the immediate past. Her house was littered with reviews, the works of the various masters he was obliged to study, and of the novelists and poets of the day: George Meredith, Turgénev, Rossetti, Swinburne, Browning. They wrangled across the dissecting-table of Maupassant, and picked the jewelled bones of Flaubert.

She went often to the theatre with him, sitting behind the curtains of a box; and, several famous Gasts from other capitals coming to Munich that summer, there were few pastimes they enjoyed more than this, the drama being the one subject upon which they were in perfect accord. Moreover, as the play was a diversion which she had never denied herself, she experienced no uneasy consciousness of knocking down outposts of old defences.

It was on the nights after the theatre that he remained until the small hours; he always returned with her for supper, as she would not go to a restaurant with him. There are no people wiser in human conduct than servants, and the comment indulged in between the old butler and the maids was upon the astonishing impeccancy of the relationship above stairs. Had it been otherwise, these good Bavarians would have taken it as a matter of course and made no comment whatever. The ingenuous morals of the Bavarians were a source of evergreen interest to Styr, who had been brought up in a country that wore silk over its rags. Upon one occasion, however, she was more embarrassed than moved to ethical musings. She was sitting with Ordham in the gallery after the evening meal, when her housemaid entered and asked permission to leave on the following morning for Leoni, her native village. Kurt withheld his consent, so she appealed to her gn?dige frau.

“What is the matter that you go so suddenly, and when do you return?” asked Margarethe, who did not like her household upset.

“I think I cannot return, Frau Gr?fin. One of my children is ill, and as I shall soon have another—which will make three—Heinrich and I have decided that it will now be cheaper to marry.”

Ordham, who was willing to discuss in the abstract all questions under the sun, blushed scarlet and dropped out of a window into the garden. Countess Tann remarked tartly:

“Indeed! It is a pity you did not think of it sooner, and then your other two children would have had the advantage of legal birth.”

“That matters not, gn?dige frau, and we must be sure of children to support us when we are old and tired, before we marry and perchance have none. And, then, apart, we can make more money for some years, and the babies can be farmed until they become too many. Divorce is not easy with us, gn?dige frau, as in America, and we find this arrangement right and just. It works well.”

Styr, who had never supposed the beer-soaked brain of a Bavarian peasant to be capable of any reasoning process whatever, looked at the girl with more interest. She was a plain heavily built creature, but nothing could be more honest, amiable, and sensible than her face.

“Very well! Tell Kurt to give you a month’s extra wages and to engage a new maid at once, I hope you will find your child better and have a merr............