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20 favourable issue, if only so as not to have to see any longer their worried countenances, which were offensive to him, and to hear their tedious gossip, which had been driving him to despair. When, thereupon, the doctor was disposed to laud the solicitude of the children, exaggerated, to be sure, but nevertheless really touching, the father concurred in a measure and explained that he found nothing at all to criticize in them other than just that they were such good and exemplary persons.

"That," he added, "is why neither of them will get much out of life; very likely they will not even get to know it." And in his eyes there shimmered a pale light of reminiscence of remote and iniquitous adventure.

They had sat only a short while on the bench before the front door when the remaining members of the Schleheim family approached, all dressed somewhat in Sunday-go-to-meeting fashion and looking for this very reason more countrified than usual. Sabine, who seemed to be aware of this, directly took off her beribboned hat and then, as though relieved, ran a hand over her simple coiffure. The doctor was persuaded to stay for dinner; conversation during the meal kept strictly to the surface of things, and when the talk chanced to turn to the fact that the director of a sanitarium in the neighbourhood of the spa entertained some thought of retiring, the mother incidentally asked her guest whether he was not tempted by such a position, in which he might, as she said, very possibly be offered the opportunity of turning his famous hunger-cures to systematic account. After Graesler had smilingly parried the jest he remarked that he had never been able, theretofore, to reconcile himself to the idea of a position of that sort.

"I cannot forego the consciousness of my own freedom," he said. "And even though I have already practised down there in town for half a dozen seasons in succession and in all probability shall continue to return in coming years, yet constraint of any kind would be sure to disturb considerably my delight in this neighbourhood, nay, even in my profession."

Sabine seemed anxious to express through a barely noticeable nod her appreciation of this attitude. She showed herself, moreover, well instructed in the conditions at the sanitarium and declared them far more tolerable than they had been in a previous period under another director, an old man grown indolent. She also ex-