that same skin of mine is, perhaps, the reason why all my days I never
could abide your buttermilk-and-roses girls, having a supply about me
enough to serve a dozen, and therefore thinking but little of their
stock-in-trade.

Now in the Wolfmark this is the common kind of beauty--not that beauty of
any kind is over-common. For our maids--especially those of the
country--look too much as if they had been made out of wooden pillows
such as laborers use to lay their heads on of nights--one large bolster
set on the top of two other little ones, and all three well wadded with
ticking and feathers. But I hope no one will go back to the Wolfmark and
tell the maids that Hugo Gottfried said this of them, or of a surety my
left ear will tingle with the running of their tongues if there be any
truth in the old saw.

It was three of the clock and the sun was very fierce on the dusty,
unslaked yard of the Wolfsberg, glaring down upon us like the mouth of a
wide smelter's oven. Fat Fritz, the porter, in his arm-chair of a cell,
had well-nigh dissolved into lard and running out at his own door. The
Playmate's window was open, and I caught the waft of a fan to and fro. I
judged therefore that my lady knew well that I was working out there in
the heat, and was glad of it--being a spiteful pretty minx.

Then I began to wonder who had given her that fan, for it was not like my
father to do it, and she knew no other. "Ah!" I said to myself, as a
thought struck me, "could it possibly be Michael Texel? He is rich, and
Helene may have known him before. The cunning, dark-eyed little
vagabond--to take my introduction yester-even as if she had never set
eyes on the fellow before, while here it is as clear as daylight that he
had all the time been giving her presents--fans and such like."