“You are fond of France?”

“Very.”

“Do you think it wise to say so here?”

“I am the American consul; nobody minds my opinions.”

“The American consul,” repeated the vintner.

Gretchen could now be seen, wending her return in and out among the clustering tables.  She set the tankards down, and Carmichael put out a silver crown.

“And do not bother about the change.”

“Are all Americans rich?” she asked soberly.  “Do you never keep the change yourselves?”

[Illustration:  “Are all Americans rich?” she asked, soberly.]

“Not when we are in our Sunday clothes.”

“Then it is vanity.”  Gretchen shook her head wisely.

“Mine is worth only four coppers to-night,” he said.

The vintner laughed pleasantly.  Gretchen looked into his eyes, and an echo found haven in her own.

Carmichael thirstily drank his first tankard, thinking:  “So this vintner is in love with our goose-girl?  Confound my memory!  It never failed me like this before.  I would give twenty crowns to know where I have seen him.  It’s only the time and place that bothers me, not the face.  A fine beer,” he said aloud, holding up the second tankard.

The vintner raised his; there was an unconscious grace in the movement.  A covert glance at his hand satisfied Carmichael in regard to one thing.  He might be a vintner, but the hand was as soft and well-kept as a woman’s, for all that it was stained by wind and sunshine.  A handsome beggar, whoever and whatever he was.  But a second thought disturbed him.  Could a man with hands like these mean well toward Gretchen?  He was a thorough man of the world; he knew innocence at first glance, and Gretchen was both innocent and unworldly.  To the right man she might be easy prey.  Never to a man like Colonel von Wallenstein, whose power and high office were alike sinister to any girl of the peasantry; but a man in the guise of her own class, of her own world and people, here was a snare Gretchen might not be able to foresee.  He would watch this fellow, and at the first sign of an evil—­Carmichael’s muscular brown hands opened and shut ominously.  The vintner did not observe this peculiar expression of the hands; and Carmichael’s face was bland.

A tankard, rapping a table near-by, called Gretchen to her duties.  There was something reluctant in her step, in the good-by glance, in the sudden fall of the smiling lips.

“She will make some man a good wife,” said Carmichael.

The vintner scowled at his tankard.

“He is not sure of her,” thought Carmichael.  Aloud he said:  “What a funny world it is!”

“How?”

“Gretchen is beautiful enough to be a queen, and yet she is merely a Hebe in a tavern.”

“Hebe?” suspiciously.  The peasant is always suspicious of anything he doesn’t understand.

“Hebe was a cup-bearer to the mythological gods in olden times,” Carmichael explained.  He had set a trap, but the vintner had not fallen into it.