Why Carlsruhe?  That was the keynote of inquiry; and no one knew.  Old men spoke unctuously of youthful scandals; women dreamed.  I suspect even Mrs. Pinckney wondered, about as much as the plowed field may wonder at the silence of the autumn.  But Pinckney limped gracefully about the sleepy avenues which converge at the Grand Duke’s palace, like a wakeful page in the castle of the Sleeping Beauty.  Pinckney was a friend of the Grand Duke’s, and perhaps it was a certain American flavor persisting in his manners which made him seem the only man at the Baden court who met his arch-serene altitude on equal terms.  For one who had done nothing and possessed little, Pinckney certainly preserved a marvelous personal dignity.  His four daughters were all married to scions of Teutonic nobility; and each one in turn had asked him for the Pinckney arms, and quartered them into the appropriate check-square with as much grave satisfaction as he felt for the far-off patch of Hohenzollern, or of Hapsburg in sinister chief.  Pinckney had laughed at it and referred them to the Declaration of Independence, clause the first; but his wife had copied them from some spoon or sugar bowl.  She was very fond of Pinckney, and no more questioned him why they always lived in Carlsruhe than a Persian would the sun for rising east.  Now and then they went to Baden, and her cup was full.

Pinckney died of a cold, unostentatiously, and was buried like a gentleman; though the Grand Duke ac tually wanted to put the court in mourning for three days, and consulted with his chamberlain whether it would do.  Mrs. Pinckney had preceded him by some six years; but she was an appendage, and her husband’s deference had always seemed in Carlsruhe a trifle strained.  It was only in these last six years that any one had gossiped of remorse, in answer to the sphinx-like question of his marble brow.  Such questions vex the curious.  Furrows trouble nobody—­money matters are enough f them; but white smoothness in old age is a bait, and tickles curiosity.  Some said at home he was a devil and beat his wife.

But Pinckney never beat his wife.  Late in the last twilight of her life she had called him to her, and excluded even the four daughters, with their stout and splendid barons; then, alone with him, she looked to him and smiled.  And suddenly his gentleman’s heart took a jump, and the tears fell on her still soft hands.  I suppose some old road was opened again in the gray matter of his brain.  Mrs. Pinckney smiled the more strongly and said—­not quite so terribly as Mrs. Amos Barton:  “Have I made you happy, dearest Charles?” And Charles, the perfect-mannered, said she had; but said it stammering.  “Then,” said she, “I die very happily, dear.”  And she did; and Pinckney continued to live at Carlsruhe.