ear given to him wholly as she continued her grave step, and he shuffling and treading out of his line across hers, or on the path-borders, and never apologizing, nor she noticing it.  At night she sang, sometimes mountain ditties to the accompaniment of the zither, leaning on the table and sweeping the wires between snatches of talk.  Nothing haunted me so much as those tones of, her zither, which were little louder than summer gnats when fireflies are at their brightest and storm impends.

My father brought horses from England, and a couple of English grooms, and so busy an air of cheerfulness, that I had, like a sick invalid, to beg him to keep away from me and prolong unlimitedly his visit to Sarkeld; the rather so, as he said he had now become indispensable to the prince besides the margravine.  ‘Only no more bronze statues!’ I adjured him.  He nodded.  He had hired Count Fretzel’s chateau, in the immediate neighbourhood, and was absolutely independent, he said.  His lawyers were busy procuring evidence.  He had impressed Prince Ernest with a due appreciation of the wealth of a young English gentleman, by taking him over my grandfather’s mine.

’And, Richie, we have advanced him a trifle of thousands for the working of this coal discovery of his.  In six weeks our schooner yacht will be in the Elbe to offer him entertainment.  He graciously deigns to accept a couple of English hunters at our hands; we shall improve his breed of horses, I suspect.  Now, Richie, have I done well?  I flatter myself I have been attentive to your interests, have I not?’

He hung waiting for confidential communications on my part, but did not press for them; he preserved an unvarying delicacy in that respect.

‘You have nothing to tell?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said.  ‘I have only to thank you.’

He left me.  At no other period of our lives were we so disunited.  I felt in myself the reverse of everything I perceived in him, and such letters as I wrote to the squire consequently had a homelier tone.  It seems that I wrote of the pleasures of simple living—­of living for learning’s sake.  Mr. Peterborough at the same time despatched praises of my sobriety of behaviour and diligent studiousness, confessing that I began to outstrip him in some of the higher branches.  The squire’s brief reply breathed satisfaction, but too evidently on the point where he had been led to misconceive the state of affairs.  ’He wanted to have me near him, as did another person, whom I appeared to be forgetting; he granted me another year’s leave of absence, bidding me bluffly not to be a bookworm and forget I was an Englishman.’  The idea that I was deceiving him never entered my mind.