The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had now only autumnal blooms for sale in the vases which flanked the entrance; the windrows of the rowen, left steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; a poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the various cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling like sere foliage as it moved.

At the Posthof the ‘schone’ Lili alone was as gay, as in the prime of July.  She played archly about the guests she welcomed to a table in a sunny spot in the gallery.  “You are tired of Carlsbad?” she said caressingly to Miss Triscoe, as she put her breakfast before her.

“Not of the Posthof,” said the girl, listlessly.

“Posthof, and very little Lili?” She showed, with one forefinger on another, how very little she was.

Miss Triscoe laughed, not cheerily, and Lili said to Mrs. March, with abrupt seriousness, “Augusta was finding a handkerchief under the table, and she was washing it and ironing it before she did bring it.  I have scolded her, and I have made her give it to me.”

She took from under her apron a man’s handkerchief, which she offered to Mrs. March.  It bore, as she saw Miss Triscoe saw, the initials L. J. B. But, “Whose can it be?” they asked each other.

“Why, Burnamy’s,” said March; and Lili’s eyes danced.  “Give it here!”

His wife caught it farther away.  “No, I’m going to see whose it is, first; if it’s his, I’ll send it to him myself.”

She tried to put it into the pocket which was not in her dress by sliding it down her lap; then she handed it to the girl, who took it with a careless air, but kept it after a like failure to pocket it.

Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber sandals, but for once in Carlsbad the weather was too dry for them, and she had taken them off and was holding them in her lap.  They fell to the ground when she now rose from breakfast, and she stooped to pick them up.  Miss Triscoe was too quick for her.

“Oh, let me carry them for you!” she entreated, and after a tender struggle she succeed in enslaving herself to them, and went away wearing them through the heel-bands like manacles on her wrist.  She was not the kind of girl to offer such pretty devotions, and Mrs. March was not the kind of woman to suffer them; but they played the comedy through, and let March go off for his last hill-climb with the promise to meet him in the Stadt Park when he came to the Kurhaus for his last mineral bath.

Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final shopping, and invited the girl’s advice with a fondness which did not prevent her rejecting it in every case, with Miss Triscoe’s eager approval.  In the Stadt Park they sat down and talked; from time to time Mrs. March made polite feints of recovering her sandals, but the girl kept them with increased effusion.

When they rose, and strolled away from the bench where they had been sitting, they seemed to be followed.  They looked round and saw no one more alarming than a very severe-looking old gentleman, whose hat brim in spite of his severity was limp with much lifting, as all Austrian hat brims are.  He touched it, and saying haughtily in German, “Something left lying,” passed on.