'Indeed I am not,' answered Ida, frankly. 'I only wonder at it. We have
seen so little of each other; we have known each other so short a time.'

'I don't think time counts for lovers,' argued the romantic Gertrude.
'One sees a face which is one's fate, and only wonders how one can have
lived until that moment, since life must have been so empty without
_him_.'

'Have you done that sort of thing often?' asked Ida, with rather a
cynical air. 'You talk as if it were a common experience of yours.'

Fraeulein Wolf blushed and simpered.

'There was one,' she murmured, 'when I was very young. He was to me as a
bright particular star. His father kept a shop, but, oh, his soul would
have harmonized with the loftiest rank in the land. He was in the
Landwehr. If you had seen him in his uniform--ach, Himmel! He went away
to the Franco-Prussian war. I wept for him; I thought of him as Leonora
of her Wilhelm. He came back. Ach!'

'Was he a ghost? Did he carry you off to the churchyard?'

'Neither to churchyard nor church,' sighed Gertrude. 'He was false! He
married his father's cook--a fat, rosy-cheeked Swabian. All that was
delicate and refined in his nature, every poetical yearning of his soul,
had been trampled out of him in that hellish war!'

'I dare say he was hungry after a prolonged existence upon wurst,' said
Ida, 'and that instinct drew him to the cook-maid.'