I laughed and kissed her.

“It is no laughing matter,” she said, with solemn eyes.

“No,” I said, suddenly solemn too, remembering how Agatha Trent died.

And I took her face in both my hands and kissed her again, but with the seriousness of a parting blessing.  For all her dignity, she has to reach up to me when I kiss her.

She put my hair tidy with a gentle hand, and said, “You are not at all what a junges Madchen generally is, but you are very nice.  Please wish that my child may be a boy, so that I shall become the mother of a soldier.”

I kissed her again, and got out of it that way, for I don’t wish anything of the sort, and with that we parted.

Meanwhile the Grafin had been sitting very firmly in her carriage, having refused all Frau Bornsted’s entreaties to come in.  It was wonderful to see how affable she was and yet how firm, and wonderful to see the gulf her affability put between the Bornsteds—­he was at the gate too, bowing—­and herself.

And now here I am, and it’s past eleven, and my window opens right on to the Haff, and far away across the water I can see the lights of Swinemunde twinkling where the Haff joins the open sea.  It is a most beautiful old house, centuries old, and we had a romantic evening,—­first at supper in a long narrow pannelled room lit by candles, and then on the terrace beneath my window, where larkspurs grow against the low wall along the water’s edge.  There is nobody here except the Koseritzes, and Herr von Inster, and two girl-friends of Helena’s, very pretty and smart-looking, and an old lady who was once the Grafin’s governess and comes here every summer to enjoy what she called, speaking English to me, the Summer Fresh.

It was like a dream.  The water made lovely little soft noises along the wall of the terrace.  It was so still that we could hear the throb of a steamer far away on the Haff, crossing from Stettin to Swinemunde.  The Graf, as usual, said nothing,—­“He has much to think of,” the Grafin whispered to me.  The girls talked together in undertones, which would have made me feel shy and out of it if I hadn’t somehow not minded a bit, and they did look exactly what the Colonel had said they were, in their pale evening frocks,—­a nosegay of very delicate and well cared-for hothouse flowers.  I had on my evening frock for the first time since I left England, and after the weeks of high blouses felt conspicuously and terribly overdressed up in my bedroom and till I saw the frocks the others had on, and then I felt the exact opposite.  Herr von Inster hardly spoke, and not to me at all, but I didn’t mind, I had so much in my head that he had talked about this morning.  I feel so completely natural with him, so content; and I think it is because he is here at Koseritz that I’m so comfortable, and not in the least shy, as I was that day at luncheon.  I simply take things as they come, and don’t