Poor Karl! and above all poor Dora! For the gray frock had been pinched and saved for as a wedding dress, if the young man whom she had crossed the ocean to find had but lived to welcome her. Anna had guessed aright, that his savings had gone to his relations; and Dora, in the midst of her grief and bewilderment, had been forced to look out for some way of supporting herself. For two years she had been nursery governess to two riotous boys, who adored and tyrannized over her; and under whose vigorous kicks and caresses her nature had slowly recovered from the shock it had received. Yet she had with difficulty persuaded herself to accept an invitation to accompany the wife of the obese little man to the Kaffee Klatsch this afternoon; but, that difficulty having been surmounted, wearing her wedding dress followed as a thing of course. It cost her a pang, no doubt, but she had nothing else. Just how the rest of the evening passed, Karl Metzerott could never after give a coherent account, even to himself. Somehow, somewhere, he was introduced to Dora; he sat near her during the concert, silent, and apparently not looking at her, yet he knew her features well by that time, and could almost have specified the number of her eyelashes. Then he took her home, actually superseding the Herr Pastor in so doing. They talked but little on the way; when they had nearly reached her home, Karl said,— “You are not betrothed to the Herr Pastor, Fräulein Dora?” “No, indeed, he has never asked me,” she replied, laughing and blushing a little, but looking up into his face with childlike, innocent directness. Perhaps little Dora was scarcely the beauty that Karl fancied her; Anna’s description, “a baby face, and frightened ways,” was much more accurate than any he could have given. But her large, blue eyes, with their long, golden lashes, were really beautiful; and nothing could have so moved the man beside her as the sight of that shy timidity, changed into calm reliance on his strength. “But you would not marry him, _nicht wahr_? He is poor, he is a fool, and he has six children.” “And he is very ugly,” said naughty Dora, deserting, without a pang, her oldest friend in America. “He is very ugly indeed,” said Karl Metzerott, in a tone of deep conviction; “God be thanked therefor.” And Dora, though she laughed and blushed still deeper, found it most convenient not to inquire his exact meaning. CHAPTER II. THE PASTOR’S BLUE APRON.