Ruth, whose character seemed made of equal parts of good taste and reasonableness, sweet temper and humor, did not offer the least opposition to discipline, and when her mother remarked that, after all, there was a difference between a schoolgirl and a young lady, she did not deny it. The colonel and Rex went off once or twice with the Jaegers, but in a halfhearted way, bringing back more experience than game. Then Rex went on a sketching tour. Then the colonel was suddenly called again to Munich to meet some old army men just arrived from home, and so it was not until about a week after Mr Blumenthal’s departure that, one evening when the Sennerins were calling the cows on the upper Alm, a party of climbers came up the side of the Red Peak and stopped at “Nani’s Hütterl.” Sepp threw down the green sack from his shoulders to the bench before the door and shouted: “Nani! du! Nani!” No answer. “Mari und Josef!” he muttered; then raising his voice, again he called for Nani with all his lungs. A muffled answer came from somewhere around the other side of the house. “Ja! komm glei!” And then there was nothing to do but sit on the bench and watch the sunset fade from peak to peak while they waited. Nani did not come “glei”—but she came pretty soon, bringing with her two brimming milk-pails as an excuse for the delay. She and Sepp engaged at once in a conversation, to which the colonel listened with feelings that finally had to seek expression. “I believe,” he said in a low voice, “that German is the language of the devil.” “I fancy he’s master of more than one. And besides, this isn’t German, any more than our mountain dialects are English. And really,” Ruth went on, “if it comes to comparing dialects, it seems to me ours can’t stand the test. These are harsh enough. But where in the world is human speech so ugly, so poverty-stricken, so barren of meaning and feeling, and shade and color and suggestiveness, as the awful talk of our rustics? A Bavarian, a Tyroler, often speaks a whole poem in a single word, like—” “Do you think one of those poems is being spoken about our supper now, Daisy?” “Sybarite!” cried Ruth, with that tinkle of fun in her voice which was always sounding between her and her parents; “I won’t tell you.” The truth was she did not dare to tell her hungry companions that, so far as she had been able to understand Sepp and Nani, their conversation had turned entirely on a platform dance—which they called a “Schuh-plattl”—and which they proposed to attend together on the following Sunday. But Sepp, having had his gossip like a true South German hunter-man, finally did ask the important question: “Ach! supper! du lieber Himmel!” There was little enough of that for the Herrschaften. There was black bread and milk, and there were some Semmel, but those were very old and hard. “No cheese?” “Nein!” “No butter?” “Nein!” “Coffee?” “Yes, but no sugar.” “Herr Je!”