“They sailed on the Kaiser Wilhelm to-day;” said that worthy.  “That’s all I know about them.  They came yesterday and left to. day.”

Mr. Grenfall Lorry returned to Washington as in a dream—­a fairy dream.  The air of mystery that had grown from the first was now an impenetrable wall, the top of which his curiosity could not scale.  Even his fancy, his imagination, served him not.  There was but one point on which he was satisfied:  he was in love.  His own condition was no mystery.

Several weeks later he went to New York to question the Captain of the Wilhelm, hoping to clear away the clouds satisfactorily.  To his amazement, the captain said there had been no Guggenslockers on board nor had there been persons answering the description, so far as he could tell.

Through the long hot summer he worked, and worried, and wondered.  In the first, he did little that was satisfactory to himself or to his uncle; in the second, he did so much that he was advised by his physician to take a rest; in the last, he indulged himself so extensively that it had become unbearable.  He must know all about her?  But how?

The early months of autumn found him pale and tired and indifferent alike to work and play.  Ha found no pleasure in the society that had known him as a lion.  Women bored him; men annoyed him; the play suffocated him; the tiresome club was ruining his temper; the whole world was going wrong.  The doctor told him he was approaching nervous prostration; his mother’s anxious eyes could no longer be denied, so he realized grimly that there was but one course left open to him.

He suggested it to the doctor, to his mother and to his uncle, and they agreed with him.  It involved Europe.

Having fully decided again to cross the sea, his spirits revived.  He became more cheerful, took an interest in things that were going on, and, by the time the Kaiser Wilhelm sailed in September, was the picture of health and life.

He was off for Edelweiss—­to the strange Miss Guggenslocker who had thrown him a kiss from the deck that sailing-day.

VI

GRAUSTARK

Two weeks later Grenfall Lorry was landed and enjoying the sensations, the delights of that wonderful world called by the name of Paris.  The second day after his arrival he met a Harvard man of his time on the street.  Harry Anguish had been a pseudo art student for two years.  When at college he was a hail-fellow-well-met, a leader in athletics and in matters upon which faculties frown.  He and Lorry were warm friends, although utterly unlike in temperament; to know either of these men was to like him; between the two one found all that was admirable and interesting in man.  The faults and virtues of each were along such different lines that they balanced perfectly when lumped upon the scale of personal estimation.  Their unexpected meeting in Paris, was as exhilarating pleasure to both, and for the next week or so they were inseparable.  Together they sipped absinthe at the cafes and strolled into the theaters, the opera, the dance halls and the homes of some of Anguish’s friends, French and American.