She seized hold of his hand and kissed it gratefully. "How dear and kind you are. Do you mean you will pay so much money to free me from my engagement? But I can tell you I shall first offer five hundred marks, then another five hundred, and so on, but under no circumstances will I give more than two thousand." He laughed gaily. "You can do as you like as regards that. I will give you the money at once. Whatever you have over belongs to you, of course." She clapped her hands with joy. "I shall buy a very elegant travelling costume with it." "Don't do it, darling," he requested. "Whatever you need in the way of dresses I will buy you in Paris. During all the time that I have been a lieutenant I have never spent half my allowance, and so it has gone on accumulating. Now I can spend a large sum of money without any conscientious scruples." "Shall we really go to Paris?" she asked, with beaming eyes. "If all goes well, to-morrow evening. We will take my man with us. I can rely absolutely on his silence. You will get in at the North Station, I at the South. I will carefully examine the train to see if any of my acquaintances are in it, and I will have a carriage reserved for us, so that we may travel in state. And if anybody sees us together later on, what does it matter? And, besides, who knows us in Paris?" "Have you ever been there?" "Yes." He began to tell of the beauties and charms of Paris, and, tenderly clinging to him, she listened to his description of the delights which she was to enjoy with him. CHAPTER VII AN ARISTOCRATIC HOUSEHOLD HILDEGARDE'S father was about to celebrate his sixtieth birthday, and the old major had expressed a wish to see his two children on that day. Fritz had naturally made use of this occasion of rejoicing as an excuse for asking the Warnows to lend him a good sum for travelling expenses; of course he had to travel first-class, and take his man with him, besides which he really must give the old gentleman a nice present for his birthday. So Captain von Warnow had once more given him a £50 note. Fritz, thereupon, had naturally tried his luck at cards, and he had the disgrace, as he himself called it, of winning a couple of hundred pounds from the owner of an estate in the neighbourhood; this did not often happen to him; he beamed with joy, and for the first time for many days he found once more that life was still endurable. Hildegarde at first did not want to make the journey, she felt hurt at her father's letter, in which he wrote: "My dear child, I should, of course, be immensely delighted to see you, but my personal wishes must not be considered if there is anything important at stake. If you cannot come, or find it unwise to go away now for a few days, then stay where you are and strike while the iron is hot."