Had I stopped at Wildbad with the party of orpheonists, I should have
encountered rather sooner the fatal beauties of Mary Ashburleigh. It
was to meet her that Fortnoye had paused at that resort, considering
her introduction to Frau Kranich almost indispensable to the success
of his scheme. She had no hesitation in following the protecting angel
of her lost child. "My object in this journey is a happy marriage,"
she had told me when to my unworthy care her guardianship had been
transferred. If I timorously suspected the marriage to be her own,
whose fault was it but mine? My heart leaped up at the successive
stages of this recital, its hopes confirmed by every additional fact:
the Dark Ladye's hand was certainly free. Fortnoye, I should surmise,
was not too desirous to abandon this magnificent companion at
Schwetzingen; but the serpent, he knew, was left behind, in company
with two or three of his and my friends: it was necessary to take
the youth by the ear, as it were, and dismiss him from the country,
without loss of time, to his future of counter-jumping. His dueling
experience may be of some use to him among the bowie-knives of
Louisiana. If his subsequent path is not strewn with roses, let him
rejoice that it is at least lubricated with cologne-water.

[Illustration: INTERRUPTED REPOSE.]

An hour had passed, and into my room from his own adjoining one now
ambled amicably my friend the baron. He greeted Joliet as an old
friend. Many a smoking-match had they had in my garden at Marly. But
Hohenfels this morning was in robes of state, with shoes that shone
even beside old Father Joliet's, and as a concession to elegance he
had abandoned his cavernous pipes in favor of cigarettes. A scroll of
this description, flavored with his Cologne pastille and very badly