Medicines taken in too large doses are said to have the opposite of the desired effect.  Thus it was with Fritz Nettenmair’s medicine; at least as regarded his young wife.  In the midst of every-day domestic work she had formerly longed for the festival of pleasure; now that this had become her every-day atmosphere her longing was for the quiet life of her home.  Satiated with the marks of honor bestowed upon her husband by the important people, she now began for the first time to notice that there were other people who measured him according to a different standard.  She began to compare, and the important people fell lower and lower in her eyes beside the every-day people.  She thought of the dull ball on the evening of Apollonius’ arrival.

She was sitting in the garden sewing while the old gentleman dreamt his heavy midday dreams.  She felt so peculiarly happy at home.  Her boys were playing at her feet, as quietly as if the old gentleman had been present, or no, not like that, for if he had been in the little garden they would not have dared to go in there at all.  The little girl had thrown her arms round her mother, who seemed herself to be still a girl, so chaste did she appear.  Now the child raised her little head with old-fashioned earnestness, looked meditatively at her mother and said:  “Whatever can be the reason?”

[Illustration:  SCHNORR VON CAROLSFELD DAVID BEING STONED BY SINAI]

“Reason of what?” asked her mother.

“Whenever you have been with us and then go away, he looks after you so sadly.”

“Who?” asked her mother.

“Why, Uncle Apollonius.  Who else could it be?  Did you scold him, or slap him as you do me when I take sugar without asking?  You must have done something to him, or he wouldn’t be so sorry.”

The little girl went on chattering and soon forgot her uncle over a butterfly.  Not so her mother.  She no longer heard what the child said.  What a queer feeling was this that had come over her, happy and unhappy at the same time!  She had let her needle fall without noticing it.  Was she startled?  It seemed to her that she was startled, much as she would have been if she had been speaking to some one and suddenly realized that it was not the person she thought.  She had thought that Apollonius wanted to insult her, and now the child told her that she had insulted him.  She looked up and saw Apollonius coming from the shed toward the house.  At the same moment another man stood between her and him as if he had grown up out of the earth.  It was Fritz Nettenmair.  She had not heard him approaching.

After putting an indifferent question he went on with strange haste to speak of the “dull ball.”  He repeated what people had said about it, told her how offended every one felt that Apollonius had not asked her for a dance, not even for the first one.  It was curious that when he reminded her of it now she felt it more keenly than ever; but not with anger, only with sad pain.  She did not say so; she did not need to.  Fritz Nettenmair was like a man in a magnetic sleep; from the leaf of a tree, from a picket in the fence, from a white wall he read, with closed eyes, what his wife felt.