Some of us had gone back to the afternoon work when Mr. Wholesome, who had lingered behind, strayed thoughtfully into the little back garden.  There under a thin-leaved apricot tree sat Mistress White, very pretty, with her long fair fingers clasped over a book which lay face down on her lap.  Presently she was aware of Richard Wholesome walking to and fro and smoking a long-stemmed clay pipe, then, as yet in England, called a churchwarden.  These were two more than commonly good-looking persons, come of sturdy English breeds, fined down by that in this climate which has taken the coarseness of line and feature out of so many of our broods, and has made more than one English painter regret that the Vandyke faces had crossed the ocean to return no more.

Schmidt and I looked out a moment into the long vista where, between the rose-boughs bending from either wall under the apricot, we could see the gray silvery shimmer of the woman’s dress, and beyond it, passing to and fro, the broad shoulders of the ex-captain.

“Come,” I said, “walk down with me to the wharf.”

“Yet leave me,” he returned.  “I shall wisely do to sit here on the step over the council-fire of my pipe.  Besides, when there are not markets and flowers, and only a straight-down, early-afternoon sun, I shall find it a more noble usage of time to see of my drama another scene.  The actors are good;” and he pointed with his pipe-stem down to the garden.  “And this,” he said, “is the mute chorus of the play,” indicating a kitten which had made prey of the grand-dame’s ball of worsted, and was rolling it here and there with delight.

“But,” I answered, “it is not right or decent to spy upon others’ actions.”

“For right!” he said.  “Ach! what I find right to me is my right; and for decent, I understand you not.  But if I tell you what is true, I find my pleasure to sit here and see the maiden when at times the winds pull up the curtain of the leaves.”

“Well! well!” said I, for most of the time he was not altogether plain as to what he meant, as when he spoke of the cat as a chorus—­“Well! well! you will go out with me on the water at sundown?”

“That may be,” he answered; and I went away.

I have observed since then, in the long life I have lived, that the passion called love, when it is a hopeless one, acts on men as ferments do on fluids after their kind—­turning some to honest wine and some to vinegar.  With our stout little German all trials seemed to be of the former use, so that he took no ill from those hurts and bruises which leave other men sore and tender.  Indeed, he talked of Mistress White to me, or even to Wholesome, whom he much embarrassed, in a calm, half-amused way, as of a venture which he had made, and, having failed, found it pleasant to look back upon as an experience not altogether to be regretted.  We none of us knew until much later that it was more than a mere fancy for a woman who was altogether so sweet and winsome that no man needed an excuse for loving her.  When by and by I also came to love a good woman, I used to try myself by the measure of this man’s lack of self-love, and wonder how he could have seen with good-will the woman he cared for come to like another man better.  This utter sweetness of soul has ever been to me a riddle.