“Well,” I said, “there isn’t any reason why you shouldn’t find out at once.”  For the Count had melted away, and Miss Callis was not nearly so much occupied with her novel as she appeared to be.

Mr. Mafferton rose, and again stroked his moustache, with a quizzical disciplinary air.

   “Oh woman, in your hours of ease
   Uncertain, coy, and hard to please!”

He quoted.  “You are a very whimsical young lady, but since you send me away I must abandon you.”

“Thanks so much!” I said.  “I mean—­I have myself to blame, I know,” and as Mr. Mafferton dropped into the seat opposite Miss Callis I saw Mrs. Portheris regard him austerely, as one for whom it was possible to make too much allowance.

In connection with Heidelberg I wish there were something authentic to say about Perkeo; but nobody would believe the quantity of wine he is supposed to have drunk in a day, which is the statement oftenest made about him, so it is of no consequence that I have forgotten the number of bottles.  He isn’t the patron saint of Heidelberg, because he only lived about a hundred and fifty years ago, and the first qualification for a patron saint is antiquity.  As poppa says, there may be elderly gentlemen in Heidelberg now whose grandfathers have warned them against the personal habits of Perkeo from actual observation.  Also we know that he was a court jester, and the pages of the Calendar, for some reason, are closed to persons in that walk of life.  Judging by the evidences of his popularity that survive on all sides, Mr. Malt declared that he was probably worth more to the town in attracting residents and investors than half-a-dozen patron saints, and in this there may have been more truth than reverence.  The Elector Charles Philip, whose court he jested for, certainly made no such mark upon his town and time as Perkeo did, and in that, perhaps, there is a moral for sovereigns, although the Senator advises me not to dwell upon it.  At all events, one writes of Heidelberg but one thinks of Perkeo, as he swings from the sign-boards of the Haupt-Strasse, and stands on the lids of the beer mugs, and smiles from the extra-mural decoration of the wine shops, and lifts his glass, in eternally good wooden fellowship, beside the big Tun in the Castle cellar.  There is a Hotel Perkeo, there must be Clubs Perkeo, probably a suburb and steamboats of the same name, and the local oath “Per Perkeo!” has a harmless sound, but nothing could be more binding in Heidelberg.  Momma thought his example a very unfortunate one for a University town, but the rest of us were inclined to admire Perkeo as a self-made man and a success.  As Dicky protested he had made the fullest use of the capacities Nature had given him, it was evident from his figure that he had even developed them, and what more profitable course should the German youth follow?  He was cheerful everywhere—­as the forerunner of the comic paper one supposes he had to be—­but most impressive in his effigy by his master’s wine vat, in the perpetual aroma that most inspired him, where, by a mechanical arrangement inside him, he still makes a joke of sorts, in somewhat graceless aspersion of the methods of the professional humorists.  Emmeline found him very like her father, and confided her impression to Mrs. Malt.  “But of course,” she added condoningly, “poppa was different when you married him.”