The very next day Vanderlyn appeared, to M’riar’s satisfaction and Anna’s fluttering joy.  He was most respectful, plainly very anxious to be of further service to her and her father.  She felt a little guilty because she had sent M’riar with the address—­if her father had not left it he certainly had failed to for no other purpose than preventing Vanderlyn from getting it—­but surely it was right for her to be good friends with one who wished to be so kind to him and her!  An hour passed most delightfully in that earnest conversation about little which engages young folk of their age and suffering from the complaint which ailed them both.

“But I really had a solemn, sober errand to attend to when I came,” he said, at length.  “My mother fell in love with you.” (He wished he might have told her that her son had, also.) “She is anxious to see more of you.” (He did not tell her that the reason was his mother’s firm conviction that her father certainly was a distinguished person in hard luck, incog.) “This summer, while she was in Europe, she found that she was sadly handicapped by knowing almost nothing of the German language.  She wants to know if you won’t come to her and teach her.  You could also be her friend, you know; a sort of young companion to a lonely woman.”  He was making it sound as attractive as he could.  He had devised the scheme with earnest care, had brought his mother round to eagerness for it with cautious difficulty, and now presented it with diffidence and fear to the delightful girl he loved.

“I teach?” said Anna, delighted by the thought of being able, thus, to help her father, and, at the same time, not utterly averse to anything which would make frequent glimpses of her knight-errant an easy certainty.  “I don’t know if I could teach.”

“Why, it’s a cinch,” said the enthusiastic lover.  “I don’t think she will be slow to learn.  She’ll work hard, mother will; she didn’t like this summer’s trip too well.  The crowned-heads didn’t tip their crowns and bow as she went by.”

“You are mistake,” said Anna gravely.  “Kings do not wear their crowns upon the streets.”

He laughed.  “You see how much we’ve got to learn?” he asked.  “May I tell my mother that you’ll come?”

“I shall ask my father,” Anna answered.

Reluctantly, after a week, Herr Kreutzer gave consent.  He was afraid he might not hold the place in the beer-garden.  He hated the cheap rag-time music which the man insisted on and had held his temper with much difficulty, when he had been reproved for playing “hymns” because he had, for solos, interspersed a worthy number now and then.  With his tenure of that place uncertain, not sure that he could find another, he felt that he would have no right to interpose too serious objections to the highly flattering arrangement Mrs. Vanderlyn proposed.  His worry about Vanderlyn subsided, somewhat, when he found the young man was away from town much of the time.