"You mean Fräulein Duff, I suppose, friend--what is your name?" I asked.
"William Kluckhuhn," answered he. "You can call me William, for short."
"Thank you. And why do you suppose me to be a countryman of Fräulein Duff, friend William?"
"Well, the old girl made a great fuss about you to me. I was to show you every attention, and you were to have this room which looks on the garden, and is really our young lady's room, and which she, heaven knows why, took a notion three days ago to make a guest-room. It seemed a little queer to us, for you are, after all, a workman in the master's factory in Berlin, as the master himself said at the table today. I am from Berlin myself, you must know, and we know there that a hand in a machine-shop is not exactly the Great Mogul. But what are we to do? After all, we have to dance to the old girl's piping, or she will abuse us to our young lady, and she reports it to the master, and then there is the deuce to pay, of course."
"So that is the way it goes, eh?" I said, laughing; "from Fräulein Duff to your young lady, and from her to the Herr Commerzienrath."
"Well, sometimes it goes the other way," said the philosophic William; "but this is not so bad, for we can hold our own with the old scarecrow; that is an eternal truth."
As I heard the pet phrase of my good friend from the impudent lips of this ironical rascal I had to look another way to avoid laughing.
"Well, and I was to ask you if you wanted any supper. Tea will be served down-stairs in half an hour. But you will get nothing with it but stale biscuit and thin sandwiches, and she thought you would be hungry."
"So I am, my friend," I replied, "and you will oblige me if you will bring me a bit of cold chicken, with a glass of wine, or whatever you happen to have handy. And one thing more, friend William. I am not a countryman of Fräulein Duff, but you will particularly oblige me if in future you never mention that lady in my presence in other than a respectful manner. Now you can go; and you will have the goodness to ask the Herr Commerzienrath if I shall wait upon him before tea."
I said these words in an impressive manner, not with the intention of humbling my friend in livery, but simple because, as a guest of the house, I considered it my duty. The facetious William gave me a look in which astonishment was blended with suspicion, and in his heart, I fancy, he thought that the old proverb, "Do not trust appearances," might also be a scrap of an eternal truth.