formed a childish habit of counting ten between the sips, and of finishing the cup with a gulp which ended it quickly; he varied his walks between cups by going sometimes to a bridge at the end of the colonnade where a group of Triestines were talking Venetian, and sometimes to the little Park beyond the Kurhaus, where some old women were sweeping up from the close sward the yellow leaves which the trees had untidily dropped overnight.  He liked to sit there and look at the city beyond the Tepl, where it climbed the wooded heights in terraces till it lost its houses in the skirts and folds of the forest.  Most mornings it rained, quietly, absent-mindedly, and this, with the chili in the air, deepened a pleasant illusion of Quebec offered by the upper town across the stream; but there were sunny mornings when the mountains shone softly through a lustrous mist, and the air was almost warm.

Once in his walk he found himself the companion of Burnamy’s employer, whom he had sometimes noted in the line at the Muhlbrunn, waiting his turn, cup in hand, with a face of sullen impatience.  Stoller explained that though you could have the water brought to you at your hotel, he chose to go to the spring for the sake of the air; it was something you had got to live through; before he had that young Burnamy to help him he did not know what to do with his time, but now, every minute he was not eating or sleeping he was working; his cure did not oblige him to walk much.  He examined March, with a certain mixture of respect and contempt, upon the nature of the literary life, and how it differed from the life of a journalist.  He asked if he thought Burnamy would amount to anything as a literary man; he so far assented to March’s faith in him as to say, “He’s smart.”  He told of leaving his daughters in school at Wurzburg; and upon the whole he moved March with a sense of his pathetic loneliness without moving his liking, as he passed lumberingly on, dangling his cup.

March gave his own cup to the little maid at his spring, and while she gave it to a second, who dipped it and handed it to a third for its return to him, he heard an unmistakable fellow-countryman saying good-, morning to them all in English.  “Are you going to teach them United States?” he asked of a face with which he knew such an appeal would not fail.

“Well,” the man admitted, “I try to teach them that much.  They like it.  You are an American?  I am glad of it.  I have ’most lost the use of my lungs, here.  I’m a great talker, and I talk to my wife till she’s about dead; then I’m out of it for the rest of the day; I can’t speak German.”

His manner was the free, friendly manner of the West.  He must be that sort of untravelled American whom March had so seldom met, but he was afraid to ask him if this was his first time at Carlsbad, lest it should prove the third or fourth.  “Are you taking the cure?” he asked instead.