There was nothing, so far as Anna saw, about the stranger in plain mufti, to make her father drop his head, pull down his hat and hurry on, almost as if in sudden panic, dragging her by a slender wrist clasped in a hand which trembled; but he did do all these things, while the queer gentleman with the upturned moustaches (Anna had no notion who he was) stopped stonestill in his stroll and gazed after them with puzzled eyes in which a semi-recognition and a very lively curiosity seemed growing.

“Who is he, father?” Anna asked, in English, which the father much preferred to German from her lips and which she spoke with carefully exact construction, but with charming rolling of the r’s and hissing of the s’s.  Her accent was much more pronounced than his, due, doubtless, to the fact that while he went daily to his little corner of the English world to earn their living, her seclusion was complete.  She saw few English save M’riar and the landlady—­whose accent never tempted her to imitation.  “He seemed to know you,” she went on.  “He seemed to wish, almost, to speak with you, but seemed to feel not positive that you were you.”

Kreutzer gave her a quick glance, then seemed to pull himself together with an effort.  He assumed a carefully surprised air.  “Who is he?  Who is who, mine liebschen?”

“The gentleman from whom you ran away?”

“I run!” said Kreutzer, doubling his demeanor of astonishment as if in total ignorance of what she meant.  “I run!  Why should I run, my Anna?  Why should I run from anybody?”

The daughter looked at him and sighed and then she looked at him and smiled, and said no more.  So many times, in other days, had things like this occurred; so many times had she been quite unable to get any lucid exposition from him of the strange occurrences, that, lately, she never probed him for an explanation.  She well knew, in advance, that she would get none, and was unwilling to compel him into laboring evasions.  But such matters sorely puzzled her.

She did not learn, therefore, that the tall and handsome man who had so curiously stared at them was the Exalted Personage; she did not learn why it had been that from him Kreutzer had fled swiftly with her, obviously worrying intensely lest they might be followed.  She did not know why, later, she was in closer espionage than ever.  Two or three days afterwards, when Kreutzer came in with his pockets full of steamship time-tables and emigration-agents’ folders, she did not dream that it was that the Most Exalted Personage had cast his eyes upon them, rather than the fact that wonderful advantages were promised to the emigrant by all this steamship literature, which had made him make a wholly unexpected plan to go from London and to cross the mighty sea.  He swore her to close secrecy.