It was easy now to understand why the young Kranich, as soon as he could identify me as a protector of Francine, had been thrown off his guard and tempted to attack me with his clumsy abuse.  It was not very mysterious, even, why he had wished all handsome girls to be drowned in the Rhine.  For him a pretty damsel was simply a rival in trade.

[Illustration:  Reading the contract.]

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 rolled, was trying to exhale itself between his lips.

“What a genius for conversation you have to-day, my Flemming!  This hour I have rocked back and forth in bed, trying to understand your observations or to cover my ears and go to rest.  Your tongue has been like the tongue of a monastery-bell summoning all hands to penance.”  But I had hardly spoken ten consecutive words.  The ears of the baron were this morning quite muffled, I think, with the abundance of his hair, which he had evidently been dressing with an avalanche of soap and water, for the topknot was as harsh and tight as a felt.  He had lemon-blossoms on his lappel and lemon kids on his fists.

It was then I remembered that my bags were all in the steamer, where I had left them when surprised by Charles’s indisposition.  My tin box would possibly yield me a button-nosegay, but otherwise I might beat my breast, like the wedding-guest in the Ancient Mariner, for I heard the summons and was unable to attend in right attire.  “We two must take you out in the street and dress you,” said Hohenfels.