But Will demurred strongly. He’d rather not go, he said; he’d stop at home by himself and get on with his operetta. At that, Rue was secretly pleased in her own heart; she felt it throb sensibly. After all, then, her poet didn’t really and truly care for the pretty alp-girl. He knew she was in the town—and, in spite of that knowledge, had spent every evening all the time with herself at the Erzherzog Johann! Nor would Florian go either; he invented some excuse to account for his reluctance. So Rue went with two new girls she had picked up at the hotel, in succession to the giggling inarticulates at Innsbruck. Linnet recognised her in the crowd, for the room was crowded—’twas a nightly ovation now, wherever Linnet sang—and knew her at once as the fair-haired lady. But Florian and Will weren’t with her to-night! That made Linnet’s heart glad. She had come without him! After all, her Engländer didn’t always dance attendance, it seemed, on the fair-haired Frau with the many diamonds! So easily had Will made two women’s hearts happy, by stopping at home at his hotel that evening! For women think much more of men than men imagine—their poor little breasts live for the most part in a perpetual flutter of love and expectancy. As the weeks wore away, however, it began to strike Franz Lindner as a singular fact, that Philippina and Linnet severed themselves so much every day from the rest of the troupe, and went up on the hills all alone for exercise. That fierce young Robbler was a true Tyrolese in his treatment of his women. Though he never abated one jot or tittle of his attentions to Linnet, it hardly occurred to him as forming any part of a lover’s duty to accompany his _mädchen_ in her morning rambles. Franz was too much engaged himself, indeed, with the young men of the place in the _cafés_ and beer-gardens, to find much time hanging idle on his hands for female society. He had made many friends in the gay little town. His hat and his feather were well known by this time to half the gilded youth in the Meran restaurants. Andreas Hausberger had turned out the young women on the hills; and there they might stop, so far as Franz Lindner was concerned to prevent them. Andreas Hausberger had been wondrous careful of Linnet’s health of late, since he saw he was likely to make pots of money from her. He had bound them all down by a three years’ engagement, and he knew now that Linnet was worth at least five times the sum he had bargained to pay her. But Franz Lindner’s health might take care of itself; and Franz didn’t think much, personally, of the air of the mountains. He’d had enough of all that in his jäger days; now the chrysalis had burst, and let loose the butterfly; his wander-years had come, and he meant to sip the sweets of advanced civilisation. And he sipped them in the second-rate bars and billiard-rooms of a small town in South Tyrol.