Arnim did not answer, nor did he show any sign of continuing on his way. He seemed suddenly caught in a painful train of thought, from which his companion made no effort to arouse him. "Poor little soul!" he said at last, half to himself. "It is terribly hard luck on her. No one loved life as she did, and now"—his brows contracted—"sometimes I feel as though I were to blame," he added abruptly. "What nonsense!" Seleneck retorted. "Are you responsible because a horse shies and a girl has the misfortune to be thrown?" "Perhaps not; but the feeling of responsibility is not so easily shaken off. I never see her—or her mother—without cursing the impulse that made me take her out that day." "It might just as well have happened any other day and with any one else," Seleneck retorted cold-bloodedly. "Of course. Only one cannot reason like that with one’s conscience. At any rate, there is nothing I would not do to make her happy—to atone to her. Besides," he added hastily, as though he had said something he regretted, "I am very fond of her." The elder man tapped him on the shoulder. "_Alter Junge_," he said pointedly, "I can trust your career to your brains, but I am not so sure that I can trust your life to your heart. Take care that you do not end up as Field-Marshal with Disappointment as your adjutant. _Lebewohl_." With an abrupt salute he turned and strode off into the gathering twilight, leaving Arnim to put what interpretation he chose to the warning. That the warning had not been without effect was clear. Arnim went up the steps of the square-built house with a slowness that suggested reluctance, and the features beneath the dark-blue cap, hitherto alight with energy and enthusiasm, had suddenly become graver and older. He found Frau von Arnim in her private sitting-room, writing letters. She turned with a pleased smile as he entered, and held out a hand which he kissed affectionately. The bond between them was indeed an unusually close one, and dated from Wolff’s first boyhood, when as a pathetically small cadet he had wept long-controlled and bitter tears on her kind shoulder and confided to her all the wrongs with which his elder comrades darkened his life. From that time he had been a constant Sunday guest at her table, had been Hildegarde’s playfellow throughout the long Sunday afternoons, and had returned to the grim Cadettenhaus at nightfall laden with contraband of the sort dearest to a boy’s heart. Afterwards, as ensign and young lieutenant, he had still looked up to her with the old confidence, and to this very hour there had been no passage in his life, wise or foolish, of which she was not cognisant. She had been mother, father, and comrade to him, and it was more by instinct than from any sense of duty that he had come to her first with his good news.