as he drew his waistcoat in, feeling quite haughty and slender.

He read on a placard that the "Präger Bavarian Sextet" would give a
"grand" concert at the Hotel Bellevue this very afternoon. "Ah ha!" said
Krayne aloud, "that's the girl I saw!" Then he wasted several hours more
loitering about the beautiful park on the Kaiserstrasse and looking in
the shop windows at views of Marienbad on postal cards, at
yellow-covered French, German, and Russian novels, at pictures of kings,
queens, and actresses. He also visited the houses wherein Goethe,
Chopin, and Wagner had dwelt. It was four o'clock when he entered the
garden of the Bellevue establishment and secured a table. The waiter at
his request removed the other chairs, so he had a nook to himself. Not a
very large crowd was scattered around; visitors at Marienbad do not care
to pay for their diversions. In a few minutes, after a march had been
banged from a wretched piano--were pianos ever tuned on the Continent,
he wondered?--the sextet appeared, looking as it did in the morning, and
sang an Austrian melody, a capella. It was not very interesting.

The women stood in front and yelled with a hearty will; the men roared
in the background. Krayne saw his young lady, holding her apron by the
sides, her head thrown back, her mouth well opened; but he could not
distinguish her individual voice. How pretty she was! He sipped his
coffee. Then came a zither solo--that abominable instrument of plucked
wires, with its quiver of a love-sick clock about to run down; this
parody of an æolian harp always annoyed Krayne, and he was glad when the
man finished. A stout soprano in a velvet bodice, her arms bare and
brawny, the arms of a lass accustomed to ploughing and digging potatoes,
sang something about turtle doves. She was odious. Odious, too, was her
companion, in a duo through which they screamed and rumbled--"Verlassen
bin i." At last she came out and he saw by the programme that her name