After this their conversation became as light and airy as that dandelion seed which every breath of summer blows across the land. They were all three young, happy in health and hope despite of fortune. Ida began to think that Brian Wendover, if in nowise resembling her ideal, was a very agreeable young man. He was full of life and spirits; he spoke German admirably. He had the Fräulein's idolized Schiller on the tip of his tongue. He quoted Heine's tenderest love songs. Altogether his society was much more intellectual and more agreeable than any to be had at Mauleverer Manor. Miss Wolf parted from him reluctantly, and thought that Ida was unreasonably urgent when she insisted on leaving him at the end of half an hour's dawdling walk up and down the river path. 'Ach, how he is handsome! how he is clever! What for a man!' exclaimed Miss Wolf, as they went back to the Manor grounds, across the dusty high-road, the mere passage over which had a faint flavour of excitement, as a momentary escape into the outside world. 'How proud you must be of his devotion to you!' 'Indeed I am not,' answered Ida, frankly. 'I only wonder at it. We have seen so little of each other; we have known each other so short a time.' 'I don't think time counts for lovers,' argued the romantic Gertrude. 'One sees a face which is one's fate, and only wonders how one can have lived until that moment, since life must have been so empty without _him_.' 'Have you done that sort of thing often?' asked Ida, with rather a cynical air. 'You talk as if it were a common experience of yours.' Fräulein Wolf blushed and simpered. 'There was one,' she murmured, 'when I was very young. He was to me as a bright particular star. His father kept a shop, but, oh, his soul would have harmonized with the loftiest rank in the land. He was in the Landwehr. If you had seen him in his uniform--ach, Himmel! He went away to the Franco-Prussian war. I wept for him; I thought of him as Leonora of her Wilhelm. He came back. Ach!' 'Was he a ghost? Did he carry you off to the churchyard?' 'Neither to churchyard nor church,' sighed Gertrude. 'He was false! He married his father's cook--a fat, rosy-cheeked Swabian. All that was delicate and refined in his nature, every poetical yearning of his soul, had been trampled out of him in that hellish war!' 'I dare say he was hungry after a prolonged existence upon wurst,' said Ida, 'and that instinct drew him to the cook-maid.'