"You have worked too hard, I fear, Christine," said Mrs. Wardor. "You look tired and thin." "Not tired," was the answer, "but I am among strangers, and have so missed my home. You know how we Germans cling to people we love." "Yes?" Perhaps Mrs. Wardor was thinking of the lover, discarded, among strangers in a strange land. Clara held her friend's hand, and asked how far they would have to go--she felt that Christine was pained. "Only a short way; but the owner of the place is a queer genius, a German, like myself, with whom no one can live in peace, they say. But I know we can, though he insists on occupying a little hut in one corner of the grounds. Fifty people have wanted the place, but he has never been in a humor to let it since the last occupant moved out. I mean to bring the charms of his mother-tongue to bear upon him, though I know it will make me hoarse for a week, more especially as he is slightly deaf." The carriage had stopped at the gate, and the three women made their way through a well-kept garden to a little shanty they espied at the farthest end of it. The dwelling-house itself consisted of a one-story _adobe_, to which had been added, much later, a frame building of two stories. The _adobe_ part of the building contained kitchen, breakfast and sitting-room, from which a low bay-window reached out into the garden, where flowers stole up almost to within the room, and the ivy, mingling with the bright green of the climbing rose, reached upward to soften the abrupt joining of the gray _adobe_ with the glaring white of the frame portion. This, though the more stately part of the building, had not the home-look of the _adobe_, around the flat roof of which ran a low railing, making a balcony of it for the service of the new wing. "How happy we shall be here," exclaimed Clara, with genuine delight. At this moment a strange figure, clad in loose garments, and with flowing gray beard, deep-set eyes, and holding a long pipe in his mouth, came into sight. Depositing the pipe carefully behind a garden vase, the man advanced with dignified yet courteous bearing. He looked with the questioning scrutiny peculiar to people hard of hearing, from one to the other; but when Christine's words reached his dull ears at last, it was to fair-faced Clara he turned inquiringly. "Wie sagten Sie, Fräulein? Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" Christine repeated her question, and he turned slowly toward her. "I thought it was she who spoke the German," motioning toward Clara; "but I like your looks, too," he continued, taking Christine's hand into his with a sudden, fatherly impulse. "And you would come and live in my house, lady," he said, addressing Mrs. Wardor in his German-English. "Take care--I say it to you--take care. It is a lonely place, and makes to be alone in the world every one who lives in it. See me, an old man, alone--alone. It is a bad spell on the place; it will make you alone, too."