Mrs. March listened with her ears, but not with her eyes, and she answered:  “See that handsome young Greek priest!  Isn’t he an archimandrite?  The portier said he was.”

“Then let him pass for an archimandrite.  Now,” he recurred to his grievance again, dreamily, “I have got to take Papa Triscoe in hand, and poison his mind against Burnamy, and I shall have to instil a few drops of venomous suspicion against Kenby into the heart of poor little Rose Adding.  Oh;” he broke out, “they will spoil everything.  They’ll be with us morning, noon, and night,” and he went on to work the joke of repining at his lot.  The worst thing, he said, would be the lovers’ pretence of being interested in something besides themselves, which they were no more capable of than so many lunatics.  How could they care for pretty girls playing tennis on an upland level, in the waning afternoon?  Or a cartful of peasant women stopping to cross themselves at a way-side shrine?  Or a whistling boy with holes in his trousers pausing from some wayside raspberries to touch his hat and say good-morning?  Or those preposterous maidens sprinkling linen on the grass from watering-pots while the skies were full of rain?  Or that blacksmith shop where Peter the Great made a horseshoe.  Or the monument of the young warrior-poet Koerner, with a gentle-looking girl and her mother reading and knitting on a bench before it?  These simple pleasures sufficed them, but what could lovers really care for them?  A peasant girl flung down on the grassy road-side, fast asleep, while her yoke-fellow, the gray old dog, lay in his harness near her with one drowsy eye half open for her and the other for the contents of their cart; a boy chasing a red squirrel in the old upper town beyond the Tepl, and enlisting the interest of all the neighbors; the negro door-keeper at the Golden Shield who ought to have spoken our Southern English, but who spoke bad German and was from Cairo; the sweet afternoon stillness in the woods; the good German mothers crocheting at the Posthof concerts.  Burnamy as a young poet might hate felt the precious quality of these things, if his senses had not been holden by Miss Triscoe; and she might have felt it if only he had done so.  But as it was it would be lost upon their preoccupation; with Mrs. Adding and Kenby it would be hopeless.

A day or two after Mrs:  March had met Mrs. Adding, she went with her husband to revere a certain magnificent blackamoor whom he had discovered at the entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the Schlossberg, where he performed the function of a kind of caryatid, and looked, in the black of his skin and the white of his flowing costume, like a colossal figure carved in ebony and ivory.  They took a roundabout way through a street entirely of villa-pensions; every house in Carlsbad but one is a pension if it is not n hotel; but these were of a sort of sentimental prettiness; with each a little garden before it, and a bower with