I did not see Gretchen again that day; but as I was watching the moon climb up, thinking of her and smoking a few pipes as an incense to her shrine, I heard her voice beneath my window.  It was accompanied by the bass voice of the inn-keeper.

“But he is a journalist.  Is it safe?  Is anything safe from them?” came to my ears in a worried accent, a bass.

So the inn-keeper, too, was a Socialist!

Said an impatient contralto:  “So long as I have no fear, why should you?”

“Ach, you will be found out and dragged back!” was the lamentation in a throaty baritone.  Anxiety raises a bass voice at least two pitches.  “If you would but return to the hills, where there is absolute safety!”

“No; I will not go back there, where everything is so dull and dead.  I have lived too long not to read a face at a glance.  His eyes are honest.”

“Thanks, Gretchen,” murmured I from above.  I was playing the listener; but, then, she was only a barmaid.

“And it is so long,” went on the contralto, “since I have seen a man—­a strong one, I wish to see if my power is gone.”

“Aha!” thought I; “so you have already laid plans for my capitulation, Gretchen?”

“But,” said the bass voice once more, “supposing some of the military should straggle along?  There might be one who has seen you before.  Alas!  I despair!  You will not hide yourself; you will stay here till they find you.”

I fell to wondering what in the world Gretchen had done.

“I have not been to the village since I was a little girl.  Dressed as I am, who would recognize me?  No one at the castle, for there is no one there but the steward.  Would you send me away?”

“God forbid!  But this American?  You say you can read faces; how about the other one?”

Silence.

“Yes; how about him?”

Said Gretchen:  “We are not infallible.  And perhaps I was then much to blame.”

“No; we are not infallible; that is the reason why you should take no chance,” was the final argument of the innkeeper.

“Hush!” said Gretchen.

“Confound the pipe!” I muttered.  It had fallen over the window sill.

Five minutes passed; I heard no sound.  Glancing from the side of the window I saw that Gretchen and the innkeeper were gone.

Yes, there wasn’t any doubt about it; Gretchen was a conspirator.  The police were hunting for her, and she was threatened with discovery.  It was beyond my imagination what she could have done.  Moreover, she was rather courting danger; the military post was only five miles down the river.  The one thing which bothered me was the “him” who had suddenly intruded upon the scene, invisible, but there, like Banquo’s ghost.  Perhaps her beauty had lured some fellow to follow her fortunes and his over-zeal, or lack of it, had brought ruin to some plot.

“Gretchen,” said I, as I jumped into bed, “whoever he was, he must have been a duffer.”