Now if the Lombards, having ignominiously taken to Latin after their descent upon Italy, had had to wait for Hauptmann to provide them with a language, they had left certain more substantial traces of themselves in the valley of the Po.  They died and were buried in state with their arms and utensils for the other world.  So that, while one might well be in doubt whether an inscription was Lombard or not, an antiquary will tell you without fail whether a clasp, a spearhead or a sword is or is not the work of this conquering but too adaptable race.  In these archaeological matters Hauptmann took a forced and languid interest.  During nightmarish hours, when the beer and cheese had not mingled aright, he was haunted by lines of Lombard runes.  Sometimes they were East Germanic, and that was a grief, taking, as it were, the bloom from the guess that had made him great; and again they were West Germanic, and that was awful, the hallucination ending in a mortal struggle with the feather bed under which German science is incubated, and passing off with an anguished “Donnerwetter!  It cannot be Lombard.  It is not possible.”  His not infrequent Italian trips had, then, an archaeological pretext, and this had been more or less the purpose of the pilgrimage in which Frauelein Linda had become by main force an alluring if disquieting incident.

If there is anywhere in the world a more satisfactory sight than the Pavian Certosa, certainly neither Hauptmann nor his chance acquaintance had ever seen it.  And indeed is there anywhere else such spaciousness of cloisters, such profusion of minutely cut marble, such incrustation, for better or worse, of semiprecious stones.  Surely nothing in a sightseeing way approaches it as a money’s worth.  Frauelein Linda, a superior person who had begun to entertain doubts as to the externals of modern Austrian palaces and the internals of new German liners, reserved her enthusiasms for the pale Borgonones so strangely misplaced amid all that splendour.  Hauptmann, on the contrary, admired it all impartially.  The sense of bulk and inordinate expensiveness made him for a moment almost regret that these later Lombards who reared this pile were not of the same race-stock with himself.  There was a moment in which he could have claimed them, had principle permitted, as West Germans.  Rather he soon forgot the Lombards in the alternate rapture and dismay aroused by the petulant yet strangely winning personality beside him.  Professor Hauptmann was used neither to being contradicted nor managed by mere women folk, and this afternoon he was undergoing both experiences simultaneously.  It was with a feeling of relief that he left the Certosa, which seemed in a way her territory, and started out with her upon the neutral highroad that led to the station.  They lingered, for the hour was propitious, and their plan was to kill an hour or so before the evening train.  As the glow came over the lowlying fields, the weary forms of the labourers began to fill the