Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Book II: The Test CHAPTER I " To see Rothenbourg, to love in Venice," was a bit of fashionable counsel that Harding had wished to apply after his marriage the previous June. He and Monica had meant to stay in the old Bavarian town only a day or two, " to see it "; but already the Tauber valley was slipping on its Nessus shirt of burning foliage, and Harding had grown restless. He wanted to follow the storks, that were abandoning their nests on the tiled archways to go where perpetual summer reigned. Somehow he hated the thought of autumn. Not that he was unhappy, nor that he questioned happiness in the future. Nothing had marred his four months of married life. It was, perhaps, that he had been, if anything, too content, and summer had symbolized it. At all events, he was tired of Rothenbourg; he wanted to travel now, as much as before he had argued to remain and rent the old little hunting-lodge, called the " Kaiserschlossen," lying outside the town, which haply had been offered for the season by some artist friends of Monica's. It had charmed him to think of trying for awhile this picturesque, irresponsible housekeeping in the tumble-down landmark of other days. The experiment could hardly be called a failure, in spite of the small domestic tragedies it involved; therehad been a touch of romance in it all. But Harding had outlived the whim. Besides, it was to be his wander year, in which to recover health—for he had suffered during the past spring from a bronchial attack —and to acquire experience and material for work. It excused him and Monica for leaving Mrs. Eversley, still in a somewhat invalidic state, especially as Miss Van- derhurst had agreed to companion her during their absence; reports from that admirable spinster had continued to be reassuring, so the two h...