The Orangery perpetually lured them by what it had kept of the days when an Orangery was essential to the self-respect of every sovereign prince, and of so many private gentlemen.  On their way they always passed the statue of Count Platen, the dull poet whom Heine’s hate would have delivered so cruelly over to an immortality of contempt, but who stands there near the Schloss in a grass-plot prettily planted with flowers, and ignores his brilliant enemy in the comfortable durability of bronze; and there always awaited them in the old pleasaunce the pathos of Kaspar Hauser’s fate; which his murder affixes to it with a red stain.

After their cups of willow leaves at the cafe they went up into that nook of the plantation where the simple shaft of church-warden’s Gothic commemorates the assassination on the spot where it befell.  Here the hapless youth, whose mystery will never be fathomed on earth, used to come for a little respite from his harsh guardian in Ansbach, homesick for the kindness of his Nuremberg friends; and here his murderer found him and dealt him the mortal blow.

March lingered upon the last sad circumstance of the tragedy in which the wounded boy dragged himself home, to suffer the suspicion and neglect of his guardian till death attested his good faith beyond cavil.  He said this was the hardest thing to bear in all his story, and that he would like to have a look into the soul of the dull, unkind wretch who had so misread his charge.  He was going on with an inquiry that pleased him much, when his wife pulled him abruptly away.

“Now, I see, you are yielding to the fascination of it, and you are wanting to take the material from Burnamy!”

“Oh, well, let him have the material; he will spoil it.  And I can always reject it, if he offers it to ’Every Other Week’.”

“I could believe, after your behavior to that poor woman about her son in Jersey City, you’re really capable of it.”

“What comprehensive inculpation!  I had forgotten about that poor woman.”

LI.

The letters which March had asked his Nuremberg banker to send them came just as they were leaving Ansbach.  The landlord sent them down to the station, and Mrs. March opened them in the train, and read them first so that she could prepare him if there were anything annoying in them, as well as indulge her livelier curiosity.

“They’re from both the children,” she said, without waiting for him to ask.  “You can look at them later.  There’s a very nice letter from Mrs. Adding to me, and one from dear little Rose for you.”  Then she hesitated, with her hand on a letter faced down in her lap.  “And there’s one from Agatha Triscoe, which I wonder what you’ll think of.”  She delayed again, and then flashed it open before him, and waited with a sort of impassioned patience while he read it.

He read it, and gave it back to her.  “There doesn’t seem to be very much in it.”