"My late husband," said the lady, as if introducing Edwin and the picture to each other. "I have been a widow ten years, but you will find everything here just as it was in his life time, this room (she opened a door to allow Edwin to look in) was his study, and contains his whole library, though as he was a mathematician, I can read none of his books. But they were his pets and his pride, and I think that picture would fall from the wall if one should ever get into a stranger's hands. If I had my way, the sooner I got the horrible things out of the house the better I should like it. They cost me tears enough when he could use them." "Tears?" "Yes, Herr Doctor, you're a learned man too, I hope you will do better some day and not say like my late husband: 'first my books, and then my wife.' And yet he married me for love and not mathematics. But after two or three years, although I had not grown exactly ugly, he found those horrid triangles and hexangles, and the queer plus and minus signs, far more attractive than the blue eyes and round cheeks of his young wife. Well, I do not complain, I had foreseen it and knew what I was doing." "But aside from this jealousy, which you share with so many women, you must have enjoyed a great deal of happiness in these rooms, or you would not have so religiously kept them in the same condition." The widow looked at him with a searching side glance, as if she wanted to ascertain whether he was not too young to be trusted with any confidential disclosures. His honest face, and frank, open bearing, untinged by any shade of intrusiveness, seemed to please her. He was quite different from the other young literati, whom she had seen with her husband. Her quick, womanly penetration enabled her to perceive at once, that she was in the presence of one of those rare men, who are really as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.