“Love you?  Yah; of course he loves you.  You think love is a game of solitaire?  But—­he will love you, liebschen.  To fall very much in love with you he has only once to see you.  But, Anna, it is not with women as it is with men. You must conceal your love, until he speaks.”

She smiled.  “And, father, what shall I do then?”

“Do when he speaks?  When comes the right man and tells you that he loves you, asking you to be his wife, mine Anna, you must answer:  ’For this so great honor, sir, I thank you, and I give you in return my heart and hand.’”

Ah, the visions in his mind as he said this, of the far-off German village, of the dainty maiden standing there before a gallant youthful gentleman, trying to be as formal, when she placed her hand in his, as lifelong training in the stiff formalities of life had made him, in his embarrassment, while he told his great devotion to her!  Thinking back along the path of years that led to that bright garden, how Herr Kreutzer smiled!

“How beautiful that sounds!” said Anna, softly. “’For this so great honor, I thank you, and I give you in return my heart and hand.’”

It brought the old flute-player back from the far garden.

“Do not practice on it yet,” he said, without unkindness, but with a firm tone which gave his words almost the stern significance of a real order.  “There is no hurry, liebschen, but, when the time is ripe for it, ah, it will come.  Yah; it will come.”

Her thoughts were full of all this talk of love and marriage as she went to Mrs. Vanderlyn’s next morning, to take up again her routine of companion and instructor to the lady in the German language.  She was not so very fond of Mrs. Vanderlyn.  That lady was too much absorbed in her ambition to gain real importance in the social world to leave much time for being lovable to anybody but her son.  That she was fond of him no one could doubt, but he was winning his own way, and did not need her mother care.  It left her free for other things; it made the other things essential to her happiness.  How empty is a mother’s life when from it, out into the world, her only son goes venturing, none but a mother knows.  Mrs. Vanderlyn had striven to fill hers with social episodes and had not done so to her satisfaction.  There were things, she had discovered, which money, by itself, cannot accomplish and the learning had astonished her.  She had thought a golden key would certainly unlock all gates.  It had come to her as inspiration that the easy way for an American to gain social favor in New York, where, hitherto, gates have been closed to her, might be to purchase social favor, first, in England or in Germany and then come back with the distinction of it clinging like a perfume to her garments.  But the purchase had not been an easy matter.  Abroad, to her amazement, money had its mighty value, but only as a superstructure.  There must be firmer stuff for the foundation—­family.  Her family was traced too easily—­for the tracing was too brief.  It ended with abruptness which was startling, two generations back, in a far western mining camp.  Beyond that all the cutest experts in false genealogies had failed to carry it convincingly.