Anne Warner

“ She put her cup down, hid her face in her hands and began to cry.
“Oh,” she sobbed, “I cannot bear it—I cannot bear it. It was not the pistol that maimed you for life, it was I—it was I—it was I. And I might have been your murderess, too, so easily, so easily.”
He turned his face toward her and laid his hand upon her arm,
“Angela,” he said, very gently, “not that—never that.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, sobbing still harder, “I can understand everything now. ”

“ Twice carriage wheels drew near—and it was not the expected carriage. The third time the carriage turned in between the freshly trimmed hedges and stopped at the door. The haus meister was on the step bowing low. The other servants stood within, bowing and courtesying. There was a great bouquet to hand to the bride. She took it with a murmured word and no smile. She was a pale bride, and the bridegroom was even paler. They both looked very tired—very bored, too.
They never raised their eyes to look at the splendid room, nor its decorations,—nor its flowers. ”

“ They were skillful men—those decorators of Bremen—they looked about and measured somewhat and then they went to work in a manner at once deft and mysterious. Everything was completed by June. The day that the wedding was taking place in St. George’s the florist was finishing his task outside the walls, and breezes from the ocean to the Weser were carrying the last faint odor of paint out of the diele. ”

“ I am not pleading, but I ask you to consider that I am an even more unwilling victim than yourself, and I beg of you to believe me when I say that the future will be brighter if you can but force yourself to some show of courtesy when others are by, for a short period. ”

“ The fashionable world was building villas in that direction, and some of the fashionables were remodeling the quaint old houses instead of erecting new ones. There was something marvelously delightful about the effect of such a piece of the Fifteenth Century, when set in this correct landscape gardening and fitted with plumbing and electric lights. It became à la mode to preserve all that was possible of the old style,—and that was largely the fortune of the decorators from Bremen. ”

“ At any rate, it was so—and it is still so in many country districts—and life is cleaner and fresher than you might expect, there behind those walls, where on one side of a stone partition two or three feet thick the cow and the calf, the sheep and the lambs, sleep nightly, while on the other the farmer’s wife tucks her many babies each in its own warm box of a bed. ”