bravery of the Austrian Tyrol—­the green alpine hat, with the feather at the back, the short gray jacket, the bare knees, and the homespun stockings.  Krayne regarded curiously this strolling band of singers.  Their faces seemed familiar to him, and he rapidly recalled souvenirs of Salzburg and an open-air concert.  But this morning there was something that arrested his attention in the group.  It was a girl of eighteen or twenty, with a brilliant complexion, large blue eyes, and a robust, shapely figure.  As she passed she gave him such an imploring look, such an appealing look, that all his chivalric instincts rushed into the field of his consciousness.  He awkwardly dropped his tumbler.  He turned around, half expecting to see the big child still looking at him.  Instead he gazed upon the athletic backs of her male companions and to the unpleasant accompaniment of hearty feminine laughter.  Were these women laughing at him?  No fool like a fat one, he merrily thought, as he bought a new glass at a bazaar, which a grinning, monkey-faced creature sold him at the regular price redoubled.

Before his meagre breakfast of one egg and a dry rusk, Krayne endeavoured to evoke the features of the pretty creature who had so strongly attracted him.  He saw a tangle of black hair, a glance that touched his heart with its pathos, a pair of soft, parted red lips, and dazzling teeth.  It was an impression sufficiently powerful to keep him company all the forenoon.  Fat men, he reasoned on the steep pass that conducts to the Cafe Forstwarte, are always sentimental, by no means always amiable, and, as a rule, subject to sudden fancies.  Ten years of his sentimental education had been sown with adventures that had begun well, caprices that had no satisfactory endings.  He had fallen in love with the girl who played Chopin on the piano, the girl who played Mendelssohn on the violin, the girl who played Goltermann on the violoncello.  Then followed girls who painted, poetized, botanized, and hammered metal.  Once—­an exception—­he had succumbed to the charms of an actress who essayed characters in the dumps—­Ibsen soubrettes, Strindberg servants, and Maxim Gorky tramps.  Yet he had, somehow or other, emerged heart whole from his adventures among those masterpieces of the cosmos—­women.

Certainly this might be another romance added to the long list of his sentimental fractures.  He ate his dinner, the one satisfactory meal of the day allowed him by a cruel doctor, with the utmost deliberation.  He had walked three hours during the morning, and now, under the spacious balconies of the Forstwarte, he knew that his beef and spinach would be none the worse for a small bottle of very dry, light Voeslauer.  Besides, his physician had not actually forbidden him a little liquid at the midday meal.  Just before bedtime he was entitled—­so his dietetic schedule told him—­to one glass of Pilsner beer.  Not so bad, after all, this banting at Marienbad, he reflected.  Anyhow, it was better