Emily's baby had had his morning bath, and after a long wrestle had at last fallen asleep, his little lips sucking automatically in his dreams, while her father, after a struggle almost as wearing, had been induced to go for a morning walk before the heat of what promised to be a sultry day should rise with the mounting sun. She had carried a tray with Jerome's breakfast up to him, and when he had eaten it he had rolled over and resumed his snoring, made more gross by the dissipations of his campaigning the night before; and now she drew a long sigh as she sank into her chair on the veranda to think that a few moments of rest might be hers at last. She rocked vigorously, as though the mere physical exercise might rest her fatigued limbs; the slow motion with which she lifted a stray lock from her brow and fastened it back in her hair told how weary she was. In her lap lay a letter which the postman had just handed her. It was a large, square envelope, of gray paper, the texture and tone of which would have told that it was foreign, even if the German stamp had not already put that fact in evidence. Emily had recognized the anglicized writing in which it was addressed as that of Dade; and the post-mark told that the travels of the Emersons had led them once more to Wiesbaden. Emily allowed the letter to lie a moment unopened in her lap, partly from inertia, more, perhaps, from a love of anticipating the pleasure its reading would give her. The breaks in the vast monotony of her life were so few that she disliked to have them too quickly over. And then, she found a charm in the romantic spell anything that comes out of the Old World still weaves for us of the New. She loved to picture Dade, in some smart Parisian gown--the very thought of which brought back to her Dade's way of calling things, especially her own dresses, "_chic_"--escaping from her hypochondriacal mother, now with petulant disrespect, now with gushes of affection, to wander with some young man down wide avenues, shaded with lindens. Sometimes she pictured the young man in civilian dress, but this morning he wore the uniform of the German army. She could see Dade, trailing her brilliant parasol over her shoulder, looking up into his face, and speaking to him in her melodious French--no, she corrected her little drama, it would be this time in her rich German which she had affected to prefer to French. Some day, she was sure, these light and transient affairs would end seriously for Dade, so seriously that she would find herself enthroned over the stately household of some old German castle with a titled military husband. How many years would then elapse before Dade would be back in Grand Prairie, with the air of the _grande dame_, lifting her lorgnette in the foreign way that would come so naturally to her? Would she grow matronly and have some yellow-haired, outlandish son with her? Would--