"Oh! Eight o'clock. But you might like to come with us--call for us at half-past seven. I wish you could speak German." "I do a little." "Mother will like that. Good-by." She turned and walked away. René stood rooted to the ground. At his feet he saw her handkerchief. He stooped and picked it up. He dared not run after her. He pressed the handkerchief to his lips, then angrily squeezed it up into a ball and thrust it into his trousers pocket. This done, he shook himself, threw back his head, and strode vigorously homeward. He said to himself: "I'm damned if I read love poems to her." He had arrived at the conclusion that but for the love poems things would never have got so maddeningly out of hand with that other maiden in Scotland. He added: "But she really is beautiful." Reading a book at supper that night, he knocked a glass of beer over onto his trousers, fumbled for his handkerchief, found Linda's, mopped up the beer with it, and gave it to his mother to be washed. She washed it with her own hands that night, ironed it, and placed it on his dressing-table so that next morning he was confronted by the embroidered name--Linda. On the Wednesday evening he clad himself in his best black coat, the same he had had since he was seventeen, put on a white dicky and cuffs, and punctually at 7:30 stood between the stucco pillars on either side of the Brocks' front door. The family was waiting for him in the hall. The women were muffled up in veils, and Kurt was wearing a very smart overcoat and new patent-leather boots. Behind Kurt in the darkness--for the hall was lit only by one flickering gas-jet in a ground-glass globe--stood another male figure. This advanced into the light and was revealed as M'Elroy. "You know each other," said Linda. Kurt cut in with: "Of course, and Fourmy thinks he is so like Mozart." René felt a pang of uneasiness. He turned to Linda to find her eyes resting now on M'Elroy, now on himself, with quick little darting glances that seemed to take in every detail. It exasperated him to be pitted against M'Elroy, but, the rivalry having been introduced, though unsought by himself, he rose to it, and so, he felt, did M'Elroy. By way of protest René moved nearer to Mrs. Brock, who was sitting on the bottom stair. "Gut Abend!" he said. "Ich bin----" "Na, Sie sprechen Deutsch? So ist's gut. Ist mir sehr lieb Deutsch zu hören." "Aber nicht----" "Sie sprechen sehr gut. Mein Sohn wird nie Deutsch sprechen. Im Goetheverein aber, wo man so schöne Musik----"