“I merely wish to explain to you, that if you wish to smoke now, you had better mount up here,” he said, seating himself on the front seat of the carriage. “My wife is quite German in every respect, but she has not yet learned to like the smell of tobacco.”
“Nor ever will,” said A. Z.; “nor shall I ever learn to like having guns so near me. Why are they not packed, as usual, in the long case?”
“You forget you have changed all arrangements since you find that Mr. Hamilton is called Alfred,” said Baron Z—, laughing.
“I only hope they are not loaded,” she said, carefully avoiding their contact, even with the hem of her garment, “for I have no fancy whatever to have my death announced in the newspapers, after the words, ‘dreadful accident!’”
“They are not loaded,” said her husband, puffing strongly from his newly-lighted cigar, as they drove off.
Hamilton was extremely amused at his comical situation, or rather at the events which had led to it, and after a few ineffectual efforts at suppression, he indulged in a fit of laughter, in which A. Z. joined; and it was some time before she could answer Baron Z—’s repeated inquiries as to the cause of their mirth.
“I really don’t know, Herrmann, excepting that perhaps Mr. Hamilton is amused at finding himself in our company. By-the-by, you do not perhaps know that he speaks very good German.”
“Like an Englishman, eh?”
“His German will prove a better medium of communication than your English, perhaps; but,” she added quickly, changing the subject, and speaking German, “tell me, did you observe the new arrivals at the table d’hôte to-day. Who are those two pretty girls?”
“Rosenthal, or Rosenberg, I believe, is their name.”