He moved off with his girls, who looked over their shoulders at the officers as they passed on through the adjoining room.

“My dear!” cried Mrs. March.  “Didn’t you suppose he classed us with Burnamy in that business?  Why should he be polite to us?”

“Perhaps he wants you to chaperon his daughters.  He’s probably heard of your performance at the Kurhaus ball.  But he knows that I thought Burnamy in the wrong.  This may be Stoller’s way of wiping out an obligation.  Wouldn’t you like to go with him?”

“The mere thought of his being in the same town is prostrating.  I’d far rather he hated us; then he would avoid us.”

“Well, he doesn’t own the town, and if it comes to the worst, perhaps we can avoid him.  Let us go out, anyway, and see if we can’t.”

“No, no; I’m too tired; but you go.  And get all the maps and guides you can; there’s so very little in Baedeker, and almost nothing in that great hulking Bradshaw of yours; and I’m sure there must be the most interesting history of Wurzburg.  Isn’t it strange that we haven’t the slightest association with the name?”

“I’ve been rummaging in my mind, and I’ve got hold of an association at last,” said March.  “It’s beer; a sign in a Sixth Avenue saloon window Wurzburger Hof-Brau.”

“No matter if it is beer.  Find some sketch of the history, and we’ll try to get away from the Stollers in it.  I pitied those wild girls, too.  What crazy images of the world must fill their empty minds!  How their ignorant thoughts must go whirling out into the unknown!  I don’t envy their father.  Do hurry back!  I shall be thinking about them every instant till you come.”

She said this, but in their own rooms it was so soothing to sit looking through the long twilight at the lovely landscape that the sort of bruise given by their encounter with the Stollers had left her consciousness before March returned.  She made him admire first the convent church on a hill further up the river which exactly balanced the fortress in front of them, and then she seized upon the little books he had brought, and set him to exploring the labyrinths of their German, with a mounting exultation in his discoveries.  There was a general guide to the city, and a special guide, with plans and personal details of the approaching manoeuvres and the princes who were to figure in them; and there was a sketch of the local history:  a kind of thing that the Germans know how to write particularly, well, with little gleams of pleasant humor blinking through it.  For the study of this, Mrs. March realized, more and more passionately, that they were in the very most central and convenient point, for the history of Wurzburg might be said to have begun with her prince-bishops, whose rule had begun in the twelfth century, and who had built, on a forgotten Roman work, the fortress of the Marienburg on that vineyarded hill over against the Swan Inn.  There had of course been history before that, but