woman, if all you want is a walk on the Küchelberg, the total absence of silly nonsense, you must at once admit, is a great recommendation. But Linnet sat on. She sat on, and listened. She drank it in, open-eyed, and with parted lips—every line and every word of it. Dear Herr Will read so well, and made her feel and understand every point so dramatically; and the book—the book itself was so profoundly interesting. Never in her life before had Linnet heard anything the least bit like it. It was grand, it was beautiful! She didn’t know till then the world contained such books; her reading had been confined to her alphabet and grammar at the parish folk-school, supplemented by the good little tracts on purgatory and the holy saints, distributed by the Herr Vicar and the sisters at the nunnery. Theological literature was the sole form yet known to her. This weird tale about Gretchen and the transformed philosopher opened out to her new vistas of a world of possibilities. Long after, when she sang in great opera-houses, as Marguerite in Gounod’s “Faust,” she remembered with a thrill how she had first heard that tale, in Goethe’s deathless words, from Will Deverill’s lips, on the green slopes of the Küchelberg. She sat there for an hour or two, never heeding the time, but listening, all entranced, to that beautiful story. Now and again Will broke off, and held her hand for a moment, and gazed deep into her eyes, and said some sweet words of his own to her. He was a poet, Herr Will, in his own tongue and land; she knew now what that meant—he could make up such lovely things as he read from the book to her. “Tell me some of your own, Herr Will. Tell me some of your own verses,” she said, sighing, at last. “I should love to hear them.” But Will shook his head. “The English is too hard. You wouldn’t understand them, Linnet,” he answered. “Let me try,” Linnet pleaded, with such a winning look that Will couldn’t resist her. And to humour her whim, he repeated the simplest of the laughing little love-songs from his book of “Voices.” The ring of it was pretty—very sweet and musical. Linnet half understood—no more; for the words were too hard for her. But it spurred her on to further effort. “You must lend me some books like that in English,” she said, simply. “I want to be wise, like you and Herr Florian.”