“Good heavens!” he shouted.  “It’s like something in a dream,” and he ran to pull the bell for help.

“No, no!  Don’t ring!  It will make us ridiculous.  They’ll think Americans don’t know anything.  There must be some way of dampening the stove; and if there isn’t, I’d rather suffocate than give myself away.”  Mrs. March ran and opened the window, while her husband carefully examined the stove at every point, and explored the pipe for the damper in vain.  “Can’t you find it?” The night wind came in raw and damp, and threatened to blow their lamp out, and she was obliged to shut the window.

“Not a sign of it.  I will go down and ask the landlord in strict confidence how they dampen their stoves in Ansbach.”

“Well, if you must.  It’s getting hotter every moment.”  She followed him timorously into the corridor, lit by a hanging lamp, turned low for the night.

He looked at his watch; it was eleven o’clock.  “I’m afraid they’re all in bed.”

“Yes; you mustn’t go!  We must try to find out for ourselves.  What can that door be for?”

It was a low iron door, half the height of a man, in the wall near their room, and it yielded to his pull.  “Get a candle,” he whispered, and when she brought it, he stooped to enter the doorway.

“Oh, do you think you’d better?” she hesitated.

“You can come, too, if you’re afraid.  You’ve always said you wanted to die with me.”

“Well.  But you go first.”

He disappeared within, and then came back to the doorway.  “Just come in here, a moment.”  She found herself in a sort of antechamber, half the height of her own room, and following his gesture she looked down where in one corner some crouching monster seemed showing its fiery teeth in a grin of derision.  This grin was the damper of their stove, and this was where the maid had kindled the fire which had been roasting them alive, and was still joyously chuckling to itself.  “I think that Munich man was wrong.  I don’t believe we beat the Germans in anything.  There isn’t a hotel in the United States where the stoves have no front doors, and every one of them has the space of a good-sized flat given up to the convenience of kindling a fire in it.”

L.

After a red sunset of shameless duplicity March was awakened to a rainy morning by the clinking of cavalry hoofs on the pavement of the long-irregular square before the hotel, and he hurried out to see the passing of the soldiers on their way to the manoeuvres.  They were troops of all arms, but mainly infantry, and as they stumped heavily through the groups of apathetic citizens in their mud-splashed boots, they took the steady downpour on their dripping helmets.  Some of them were smoking, but none smiling, except one gay fellow who made a joke to a serving-maid on the sidewalk.  An old officer halted his staff to scold a citizen who had given him a mistaken direction.  The shame of the erring man was great, and the pride of a fellow-citizen who corrected him was not less, though the arrogant brute before whom they both cringed used them with equal scorn; the younger officers listened indifferently round on horseback behind the glitter of their eyeglasses, and one of them amused himself by turning the silver bangles on his wrist.