"Well, facts are facts," said Frau Kummerfelden. "The raven-mother is perhaps a trifle massively built. To be sure, last winter, when I was full of all kinds of pains, she picked me up out of bed and put me in again like a child. It's true she puffed and snorted over it as if she'd been Saint Christopher, which wouldn't suit everybody." "No, no, no," said the little widow, "one must know how to move without making a noise." One day the pretty little woman said, "It's time for me to be getting home now--my gentlemen will be waiting for me. One of them will need me to get his beer for him." "Gentlemen?" said the captain, taken aback. "What kind of gentlemen have you got?" "For board and lodging," she said; and her merry heart-shaped face with its round brown eyes looked up rather challengingly at the old soldier. "The devil!" he cried. "What's the matter with you?" said Frau Kummerfelden. "It's a very good thing that Providence has sent a couple of decent, sensible men into this part of the town, or how should the poor thing live?" The captain laughed a little awkwardly. When she had gone, he got up stiffly from the table and walked about the room. "That boarder business doesn't please me at all," he said crossly. "Look at the man!" laughed Frau Kummerfelden. "Captain, you needn't worry yourself. She's so clever that you have no thread fine enough to thread her needle." From that day neither the captain nor the little widow was ever missing from Frau Kummerfelden's on Sunday afternoon, until it got too much for the old lady. It was some time before she began to notice that the captain and the young woman were getting to be on terms of courtship. "Lord," she said within herself, "Thou hast chosen to ordain that my eyes should never see a man who couldn't get a woman, a man whom no woman would look at. Amen." When she finally became aware of what was going on, she began to make excursions into the country on Sunday afternoons. She took her sewing-bag, put on a big hat over her cap, dressed herself in a becoming flowered dress, and locked the door of the house in the Entenfang behind her. Then she went off to contemplate God's free nature, picking up on the way a few rolls at the baker's, so that she might have something to dip in her coffee at Rödchen, Tröbsdorf, or Süssenborn. "Well," she said to herself, "we've got 'Tubby' to the point where she doesn't need a stepmother; it's quite unnecessary that she should have one at all, least of all Frau Marianne. I believe in giving every one their due--but I wouldn't risk a penny on betting that her heart is even as big as an old hen's that you make soup out of. I really don't see any reason why we should provide her with a sinecure up on the Ettersberg."