CHAPTER XXVI.

Emmeline had childlike lapses; she rejoiced greatly, for instance, at seeing a Strasbourg stork.  She confessed, when she saw it, to having read Hans Andersen when she was a little girl, and was happy in the resemblance of the tall chimneys he stood on, and the high-pitched red roofs he surveyed, to the pictures she remembered.  But, for that matter, so were we all.  We had an hour and a half at Strasbourg, and we drove, of course, to the Cathedral; but it was the stork that we saw, and that each of us privately considered the really valuable impression.  He stood beside his nest with his chin sunk in his neck, looking immensely lucky and wise, and one quite agreed with Emmeline that it must be lovely to live under him.

We lunched at the station, and, as the meal progressed, saw again how widespread and sincere is the German sentiment to which I alluded, perhaps too lightly, in the last chapter.  Our waitresses were all that could be desired, until there came between us and them a youth from parts without.  He was sallow, and the waitresses were buxom; he might have been a student of law or medicine, they were naturally of much lower degree.  But they frankly forsook us and sat down beside him in terms of devotion and an open aspect of radiant happiness.  When one went to draw his lager beer he put an unrepelled arm round the waist of the other, and when the first came back he chucked her under the chin with undisguised affection, the while we looked on and starved, none knowing the language except Isabel, who thought of nothing but blushing.  As Mr. Malt said, if the young man could only have made up his mind, we might have been able to get along with the rejected one; but, apparently, he was not in the least embarrassed by numbers, sending a large and beguiling smile to yet a further hand-maiden, who passed enviously through the speise-salle with a basin of soup.  It was only when Dicky stalked across to the old woman who sold sausages and biscuits behind a counter, and pointed indignantly to the person who held all the available table service of the Strasbourg railway station on his knees, that we obtained redress.  The old woman laughed as if it were amusing, and called the maidens shrilly; but even then they came with reluctance, as if we had been mere schnapps instead of ten complete luncheons, one soup, and a bread and cheese, as Dicky said.  The bread and cheese was the Count, and one gathered from it that the improvement in his immediate prospects was not yet assured, that the arrangimento was still in futuro.