"You are too good, meine Gnädigste," he said, consoled by this for the tête-à-tête he had just had with his mother; "but if it in any way inconveniences you—we soldiers are used to roughing it——"
"But not like that, not like that, lieber Junge," interrupted his mother anxiously. "It is not fit for a dog, that inn, and I heard this very evening from the housemaid that one of the children there has the measles."
That quite settled it. Anna could not expose Karlchen to measles. Why did he not stay, as he had written he would, at Stralsund? As he was here, however, she could not let him fall a prey to measles, and she asked the princess to order a room to be got ready.
It is a proof of her solemnity on that first evening with Karlchen that when his mother, praising her beauty, mentioned her dimples as specially bewitching, he should have said, surprised, "What dimples?"
It is a proof, too, of the duplicity of mothers, that the very next day in church the princess, sitting opposite the innkeeper's rosy family, and counting its members between the verses of the hymn, should have found that not one was missing.
Karlchen left on Sunday evening after a not very successful visit. He had been to church, believing that it was expected of him, and had found to his disgust that Anna had gone for a walk. So there he sat, between his mother and Princess Ludwig, and extracted what consolation he could from a studied neglect of the outer forms of worship and an elaborate slumber during the sermon.
The morning, then, was wasted. At luncheon Anna was unapproachable. Karlchen was invited to sit next to his mother, and Anna was protected by Letty on the one hand and Fräulein Kuhräuber on the other, and she talked the whole time to Fräulein Kuhräuber.
"Who is Fräulein Kuhräuber?" he inquired irritably of his mother, when they found themselves alone together again in the afternoon.
"Well, you can see who she is, I should think," replied his mother equally irritably. "She is just Fräulein Kuhräuber, and nothing more."
"Anna talks to her more than to anyone," he said; she was already "Anna" to him, tout court.