“Draw me also, Mary mild,
To adore Thee and thy Child!
Mary mild,
Star in desert drear and wild.”
So she sang, and sewed, and measured Bobby’s height as he passed by the wainscoting in the passage, and cunningly cut a pattern.
“So high,” she reflected, humming, “is his shoulder. And so, to this panel, should go the little trousers. ‘Star in desert drear and wild.’”
Now and then, in the evenings, when the Americans were away, and Bobby was snug in bed, with Tucker on the tiny feather comfort at his feet, the Fraulein would come downstairs and sit in Black Humbert’s room. At such times the niece would be sent on an errand, and the two would talk. The niece, who, although she had no lover, was on the lookout for love, suspected a romance of the middle-aged, and smiled in the half-darkness of the street; smiled with a touch of malice, as one who has pierced the armor of the fortress, and knows its weakness.
But it was not of love that Humbert and the Fraulein talked.
Herman Spier was busy in those days and making plans. Thus, day by day, he dined in the restaurant where the little Marie, now weary of her husband, sat in idle intervals behind the cashier’s desk, and watched the grass in the Place emerge from its winter hiding place. When she turned her eyes to the room, frequently she encountered those of Herman Spier, pale yet burning, fixed on her. And at last, one day when her husband lay lame with sciatica, she left the desk and paused by Herman’s table.
“You come frequently now,” she observed. “It is that you like us here, or that you have risen in the shop?”
“I have left the shop,” said Herman, staring at her. Flesh, in a moderate amount, suited her well. He liked plump women. They were, if you please, an armful. “And I come to see you.”
“Left the shop!” Marie exclaimed. “And Peter Niburg—he has left also? I never see him.”
“No,” said Herman non-committally.