Besides their “moving and unpacking,” as Sally jocularly called it,—for they had little to move but their three selves,—and the meals to prepare for their regular customers, there was the supper to be served at the ball that night, so it may be imagined that the Prices had their hands full. Franz Schaefer came around early “to help,” as he said, in reality to look at Polly in the intervals of his proper business of attending to the fire and lights. He was now a tall, somewhat gawky youth of nearly seventeen, with his father’s reddish hair standing up like a halo around an honest, open, but ugly countenance, which, lacking the pastor’s nervous quickness, wore for its most constant expression a stolid impassibility. Only with his violin upon his shoulder did his face light up or change; but, with the soft touch of the electric wood against his cheek, the eyes grew soft and humid, a half-smile curved the corners of the rather heavy lips, and a slight color crept into his usually pale face. Polly, who was three years his senior, laughed at the lad’s devotion, and alternately petted and scolded him, like a mother. Franz submitted; but he had entirely made up his mind as to his own course. “I mean to marry her if she will wait until I come back from Germany,” he said to himself. “If she marries any one else, I will kill him like a mosquito.” Certainly, no one suspected such bloodthirsty designs in the quiet youth who lounged awkwardly against the doorpost as the members of the Männerchor climbed, laughing and talking, up the steep winding staircase that led to the Concert Hall, most of them pausing to chaff “Janitor Franz,” as they went by. Franz was not good at chaff; he never could think of anything clever enough to say until the occasion was past. Then he thought of a plenty, he said. Sometimes he confided some of the things he ought to have said to Polly, who laughed at him undisguisedly. “If you were a soldier, Franz,” she said, “you’d go after your ammunition just as the battle was beginning.” As usual Franz only grinned in reply, but later in the evening he suddenly exclaimed aloud, “Not if somebody I can imagine were on the other side.” Several persons standing by looked at him in surprise; but Franz did not deign to explain that the imaginary somebody was Polly’s possible husband.