“You need not stir, young sir,” said the earl; and turning to his brother-in-law, he added: “Your apartments are secured, Force. As soon as I received your telegram saying that you would join me here, I sent off a dispatch to secure them for you. I hardly need to remind you that you are all my guests while we are together. But you traveled by the night express. You must have done so to reach this place so early in the day; so you will want to go to your rooms. After you have refreshed yourselves, join me here at breakfast.” Le arose at the earl’s request, and pulled at the bell knob with a vigor lent by his impatience at being called from the side of his beloved, and which soon brought a servant to the room. “Show these ladies and gentlemen to the apartments prepared for them,” said the earl. The man, with many bows, preceded the party from the room and conducted them to a large family suit of rooms on the third floor, overlooking the New Promenade. The travelers remained some weeks at Baden-Baden. The baths were doing the earl much good. Mr. Force also needed their healing powers. Somewhere on his travels with the young people, not having his wife to look after him, he had contracted rheumatism; he could not exactly tell when or where or how, whether from exposure or rain and mist on the mountains, or from fishing on the lakes, or from sleeping in damp sheets, and drinking the sour wine of the country, or from all these causes put together, he could not say, so gradually and insidiously had the malady crept upon him, taking its chronic and least curable form. He had not mentioned one word of this in any of his letters, nor had he spoken of it on his arrival. “Indeed,” as he afterward explained, “never having had any experience to guide me, I did not recognize the malady at first, but merely took the feeling of heaviness in all my frame for over-fatigue, and even when that heaviness, being increased, became a general aching, I still thought it to be the effect of excessive fatigue. I was slow to learn and slower to confess that I had the special malady of age—rheumatism. However, I thank Heaven it is not acute. It has never laid me up for a day,” he added, laughing at his misfortune. Indeed, his troubles seldom kept him from making up parties for excursions to the various objects of interest in the town and its environs. Only when the days were both cold and wet, as is sometimes, not often, the case in early autumn there, did Abel Force allow his young folks to go forth alone under the care of their mother and the escort of Leonidas, while he stayed within doors and played chess with the invalid earl. In this way the brothers-in-law became better acquainted and more attached. “I wish you were an Englishman, Force,” said the earl one day, when he had just checkmated Abel and was resting on his laurels. “Why?” “Not because I do not admire and respect your nationality, but simply for one reason.” “What is that?”