Mrs. March could not allow that they would do so; or at least that the name of Roentgen would ever lend more lustre to his city than that of Longfellow’s Walther von der Vogelweide.  She was no less surprised than pleased to realize that this friend of the birds was a Wurzburger, and she said that their first pilgrimage in the morning should be to the church where he lies buried.

LIII.

March went down to breakfast not quite so early as his wife had planned, and left her to have her coffee in her room.  He got a pleasant table in the gallery overlooking the river, and he decided that the landscape, though it now seemed to be rather too much studied from a drop-certain, had certainly lost nothing of its charm in the clear morning light.  The waiter brought his breakfast, and after a little delay came back with a card which he insisted was for March.  It was not till he put on his glasses and read the name of Mr. R. M. Kenby that he was able at all to agree with the waiter, who stood passive at his elbow.

“Well,” he said, “why wasn’t this card sent up last night?”

The waiter explained that the gentleman had just, given him his card, after asking March’s nationality, and was then breakfasting in the next room.  March caught up his napkin and ran round the partition wall, and Kenby rose with his napkin and hurried to meet him.

“I thought it must be you,” he called out, joyfully, as they struck their extended hands together, “but so many people look alike, nowadays, that I don’t trust my eyes any more.”

Kenby said he had spent the time since they last met partly in Leipsic and partly in Gotha, where he had amused himself in rubbing up his rusty German.  As soon as he realized that Wurzburg was so near he had slipped down from Gotha for a glimpse of the manoeuvres.  He added that he supposed March was there to see them, and he asked with a quite unembarrassed smile if they had met Mr. Adding in Carlsbad, and without heeding March’s answer, he laughed and added:  “Of course, I know she must have told Mrs. March all about it.”

March could not deny this; he laughed, too; though in his wife’s absence he felt bound to forbid himself anything more explicit.

“I don’t give it up, you know,” Kenby went on, with perfect ease.  “I’m not a young fellow, if you call thirty-nine old.”

“At my age I don’t,” March put in, and they roared together, in men’s security from the encroachments of time.

“But she happens to be the only woman I’ve ever really wanted to marry, for more than a few days at a stretch.  You know how it is with us.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” said March, and they shouted again.

“We’re in love, and we’re out of love, twenty times.  But this isn’t a mere fancy; it’s a conviction.  And there’s no reason why she shouldn’t marry me.”