She thoroughly approved of his plans from her own healthy point of view.

“There are enough people,” she said, “who are born physicians and men of action, and there are far too many entering those careers and jostling one another out of the way.”

She spoke of Ritter with sympathy, yet in a tone of superiority, and smiled with benignant understanding upon his naive penetration into the regions of the Upper Four Hundred.

“Life,” she said, “when it is eager to hurry on with a show of vivacity, demands credulity, love of pleasure, ambition.  I, myself, before my father lost the greater part of his fortune, got to know high life in England through and through.  I found it insipid and boresome.”

When Frederick was able to stand alone and walk and go up and down stairs, Miss Burns left for New York to complete the work that she had begun in Ritter’s studio, wishing to finish it before the middle of May, when she intended to return to England to straighten out some legal matters in connection with a small inheritance from her mother, who had died two years before.  She had already engaged passage on the Auguste Victoria of the Hamburg-American line.  Frederick von Kammacher let her go without protest.  He did not try to detain her.  He profoundly admired the girl who was so strong and stately; and he had conceived of his future existence as a state of lasting companionship with her.  There was Dutch and German blood combined with the culture and polish of the Englishwoman.  Wherever she settled down, wherever she busied herself, she produced the cosey charm of the English home.  She was healthy and, as Frederick had to admit, very beautiful.  He did not detect the faintest symptom of the thing he most dreaded, feminine hysteria.

“I should like to have a comrade like her for life,” he thought.  “I should like her to be the mother of Angele’s children.”

XXXI

Frederick grew better daily.  It seemed to him as if he had been ill for more than a decade.  His body was not undergoing a process of evolution but of rebuilding from fresh young cells.  The same thing seemed to be happening to his soul.  The burden that had been weighing upon his spirits, the restless thoughts that had constantly been circling about the various shipwrecks in his life had departed.  He had thrown off his past as one discards a cloak which the wind and weather, thorns and sword thrusts have torn and worn.  Memories, which before his illness had forced themselves upon him unbidden in the awful guise of actual presence, no longer recurred to him.  To his astonishment and satisfaction he observed that they had sunk forever on the other side of a remote horizon.  The itinerary of his life had brought him to a province wholly new and novel.  He had passed through a fearful process of fire and water and had come out cleansed, purified and young.  Convalescents always grope their way into their newly granted lives, like children without a past.