"I can not think what has happened to them! They must be wrong in their heads! Are you aware that not one of them has thrown us a single bouquet?"

66

'Why should they?" answers Belinda; none of them.”

we know "Even though they do not know us, they might toss us a handful of flowers," says Sarah, grumblingly; "I am sure we look wistful enough, and that requires no great amount of acquaintance!"

"I should think it extremely impertinent if they did!" replies Belinda, loftily.

The other pouts.

"For my part, then, I wish that they would begin to be impertinent at once!"

But for such insolence the Saxon army appears to have no sort of bent. In silence the neglected girls drive on. And the sun shines, and the east wind blows, and the big drum booms, and the great brass instruments blare, and still they trot round the bit of dull water, up the straight drives, past the Museum of Antiquities. A rain of spring nosegays falls around them, but not one is aimed at their humble landau; not one drops, even by accident, into their empty laps.

Here come the King and Queen again; the mouse-colored and silver outriders; the suave and middle-aged pair of little royalties. The gloom on Sarah's face deepens, and even in Belinda's eyes the anxious, seeking look has grown intensified. If they know no one in this gay foreign throng, whom is she seeking?

"After all," she presently says, "you knew, Sarah when you were so anxious to come, that we should meet no acquaintance here except Professor Forth, and-"

"Well, and why is not he here, pray?" cries Sarah, with a burst of genuine ill-humor that seems sensibly to ease her. "Did not I order him to be punc

tual to the moment? Even he would be better than nothing!"

Belinda smiles ironically.

“That is an enthusiastic form of encomium upon the man that you are going to marry!"

But Sarah does not heed. Her eyes are directed to the sidewalk, where the brisk foot-passengers pass and repass.

"There he is!" she cries in a disgusted voice; "certainly there is no mistaking him! Did you ever see such a gait in your life? Look at him slouching along on his great flat feet!"

Belinda looks as directed; and sure enough, amid the strapping soldiers erect and tall detects without difficulty a slovenly middle-aged figure, clerical, if you judge by its coat; scholarly, if you decide by its spectacles. With his hands behind him, and his hat set somewhat on the back of his head, he is mooning absently along.

"Is it possible?" cries Sarah, half-rising from her seat, and in a tone that is almost awful from its ire. "Yes; it is monstrous; it is unbelievable! but it is nevertheless true that he has not brought me a bouquet after all!"

"Yes, he has," replies Belinda, quietly, "only it is so small that it requires a keen sight to perceive it."

As they speak, the object of their observation becomes aware of their vicinity, and, turning his moony scholar's gaze toward them, awkwardly aims at them a tiny bunch of not particularly fresh violets. It falls into his betrothed's lap, but not long does it remain there. With an angry gesture, and before Belinda can stop her, she has tossed it out into the road; and the Gardereiter, with his six black horses, and his confiding companion, who are just in the act of again passing, drive over it, and grind it into the dust. Thanks, however, to his near-sight,

the donor is saved from witnessing this humbling spectacle.

"I am afraid that my aim was not good," he says innocently, as the carriage draws up at the sidewalk, exploring, as he speaks, the interior through his spectacles in search of his missing posy. "I fear that the nosegay I directed toward you must have fallen short, and never reached you."

"Oh, yes it did," replies Sarah, with a sort of ferocious playfulness; "but as it was too large for me to carry, I put it outside."

"How late you are!" cries Belinda, hastily trying, by a rapid change of subject and a sweet, good-natured smile, to erase the traces of this suave speech. "After playing us so false, you can not expect to find us in a very good humor."

"I was delayed by an accident," replies the lover, irritably. "I found the east wind so very much keener than I was aware of "—shivering a little, and buttoning his coat more tightly over his narrow chest-"that as I am extremely susceptible to cold, I was compelled to return to my lodgings for a second overcoat. Sarah knows" —with a rather resentful glance at his fiancée-" that I am extremely susceptible to cold."

But Sarah heeds him no more than she does the east wind of which he complains.

"Ah! Bravo!" she is crying, joyfully, as another bouquet-a real one this time-large as a Cheshire cheese, fragrant as a hot-house, choice and costly as should be young Love's tribute, comes flying into the carriage.

She has stretched out both hands to grasp it; no doubt as to its destination troubling her triumph, although to a looker-on it would have seemed as if it were aimed more at the other sister, at Belinda, who has also half-stretched out her hands, but has quickly withdrawn

them, and turned with patient attention, though with something of a blank look on her face, to the Professor's fretful sarcasms on the adsurdity of an al fresco entertainment in such weather. But though he misses nothing in her civil listening, though her head is turned toward him and quite averted from her sister, yet her ears miss no one syllable of that sister's exuberant thanks.

"Come near, that I may bless you!" she hears her cry coquettishly. "You see I have not a hand to give you; but you must blame yourself for that. What a giant it is! How fresh ! How good!"- evidently smelling it. "It has quite put me into good-humor again with this odious entertainment. I assure you I so flouted in my life! What boors they are! How different it would have been if they had been Frenchmen!" etc., etc.

never was

Perhaps it is that her volubility leaves no space for answers from the person she addresses. Certain it is that he is strangely silent. Is it not odd to accept gratitude so bounteous with so entire a dumbness? In pondering on this problem, Belinda presently loses the thread of the Professor's plaints; awakes from her musing to find him first gazing at her with surprised offense, then gone; then succeeded in his station at the carriage-door by some one; some one else who has no spectacles, who does not stoop nor cower before the east wind; some one young, in short-word of splendid compass! He is young not with the conventional youth loosely assigned by society to any unmarried male under eighty, but really young; some one who three-and-twenty years ago did not exist.

Who that was not young and callow would be staring at her with all his eyes, and saying aggrievedly under his breath:

"Why did you not catch it? You knew I meant it for you!"

She looks back at him: a happy, red smile warming the face that men have often blamed as chill and high. "I did my best!"

"What are you two gabbling about?" cries Sarah, restlessly, cutting ruthlessly short a sentence of her betrothed's. "Are you saying anything about me? Ah! I see you both look guilty!"

Neither undeceives her.

A quarter of an hour later the two girls are bowling homeward to their grandmamma and their apartment in the Lüttichau Strasse, leaving behind them the King, the Queen, the Graf von Sin his barouche, and the brave soldiers, both blue and green. Belinda has bent her delicate head, and is laying her cheek most tenderly against the blossoms in her sister's lap.

"Let me beg of you not to mumble them," cries Sarah, politely, interposing a prohibitory hand. "You always seem to have an idea that flowers ought to be eaten." Then seeing a quite unaccountable flash of indignation in her sister's eyes, adds generously, "If they were not all wired, as I see they are, I would spare you an orchid or two."

"Would you indeed!" replies Belinda, ironically. But, further than this, her magnanimous silence does not give way.

CHAPTER II

A NIGHT has passed since the Professor's damaged violets bit the dust. It is now morning, and at the window of her bedroom in the Lüttichau Strasse, with the sash flung high (to the deep astonishment of the German Dienst-mädchen, to whom the smell of an unaired room, further flavored with departed sausages and old beer, is