Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/188

 etchings on the walls, and opened a white door leading into a big room, furnished as a library. There was a wood fire burning there, and at a glance Brand noticed one or two decorations on the walls—a pair of foils with a fencing-mask and gauntlets, some charcoal drawings—one of a girl's head, which was this girl's when that gold hair of hers hung in two Gretchen pig-tails—and some antlers.

"Here you can sit and smoke your pipe," said Elsa von Kreuzenach, "Also, if you are bored, you can read those books. You see we have many English authors—Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Kipling—heaps. My brother and I used to read all we could get of English books."

Brand remembered that Franz von Kreuzenach had read Kipling. He had quoted "Puck of Pook's Hill" to Eileen O'Connor.

"Now and then," he said, "I may read a little German."

"Pooh!" said the girl. "It is so dull, most of it. Not exciting, like yours."

She opened another door.

"Here is your bedroom. It used to belong to my brother Heinrich."

"Won't he want it?" asked Brand.

He could have bitten his tongue out for that question when the girl answered it.

"He was killed in France."

A sudden sadness took possession of her eyes and Brand said, "I'm sorry."

"Yes. I was sorry, too, and wept for weeks. He was a nice boy, so jolly, as you say. He would have been an artist if he had lived. All those charcoal sketches are by him."

She pointed to the drawing of a young man's head over the dressing-table.