than the existence of those fellows at sea-shore and mountain, who gorged and guzzled their summer away.  Then he tried to remember among his London club friends any who were as heavy as he, but he could not.  Idly smoking, he regarded the piazzas, with their tables and groups of obese humanity, eating, drinking, and buzzing—­little fat flies, he thought, as he drew his waistcoat in, feeling quite haughty and slender.

He read on a placard that the “Praeger Bavarian Sextet” would give a “grand” concert at the Hotel Bellevue this very afternoon.  “Ah ha!” said Krayne aloud, “that’s the girl I saw!” Then he wasted several hours more loitering about the beautiful park on the Kaiserstrasse and looking in the shop windows at views of Marienbad on postal cards, at yellow-covered French, German, and Russian novels, at pictures of kings, queens, and actresses.  He also visited the houses wherein Goethe, Chopin, and Wagner had dwelt.  It was four o’clock when he entered the garden of the Bellevue establishment and secured a table.  The waiter at his request removed the other chairs, so he had a nook to himself.  Not a very large crowd was scattered around; visitors at Marienbad do not care to pay for their diversions.  In a few minutes, after a march had been banged from a wretched piano—­were pianos ever tuned on the Continent, he wondered?—­the sextet appeared, looking as it did in the morning, and sang an Austrian melody, a capella.  It was not very interesting.

The women stood in front and yelled with a hearty will; the men roared in the background.  Krayne saw his young lady, holding her apron by the sides, her head thrown back, her mouth well opened; but he could not distinguish her individual voice.  How pretty she was!  He sipped his coffee.  Then came a zither solo—­that abominable instrument of plucked wires, with its quiver of a love-sick clock about to run down; this parody of an aeolian harp always annoyed Krayne, and he was glad when the man finished.  A stout soprano in a velvet bodice, her arms bare and brawny, the arms of a lass accustomed to ploughing and digging potatoes, sang something about turtle doves.  She was odious.  Odious, too, was her companion, in a duo through which they screamed and rumbled—­“Verlassen bin i.”  At last she came out and he saw by the programme that her name was Roeselein Gich.  What an odd name, what an attractive girl!  He finished his coffee and frantically signalled his waitress.  It was against the doctor’s orders to take more than one cup, and then the sugar!  Hang the doctor, he cried, and drank a second cup.

She sang.  Her voice was an unusually heavy, rich contralto.  That she was not an accomplished artiste he knew.  He did not haunt opera houses for naught, and, like all fat men who wear red ties in the forenoon, he was a trifle dogmatic in his criticism.  The young woman had the making of an opera singer.  What a Fricka, Brangaene, Ortrud, Sieglinde, Erda, this clever girl might become!  She was musical,