The next day at luncheon the German lady stared again, and looked away quickly.

Anne-Marie asked her mother: "What is Irish stew when he is alive?" Nancy smiled and dimpled. Then the German lady, who had seen the dimple and the smile, said in a sudden, loud voice, over which she had no control: "Is your name Nancy?"

Nancy looked up with a start. "Yes!" she said. And everyone was silent.

"My name is FrÄulein MÜller," said the German lady, taking a pink-edged handkerchief from her pocket and making ready for tears.

"FrÄulein MÜller! FrÄulein MÜller!" said Nancy dreamily. "You read Uhland to me, and Lenau, and ... 'shine out little head sunning over with curls.'"

Then FrÄulein MÜller wept in her handkerchief, and Nancy rose from her seat and went round and kissed her. Then it was FrÄulein MÜller's turn to get up and go round and kiss Anne-Marie; whereupon the sulphur-haired lady remarked how small the world was; and the witty man said they would next discover that he and she were brother and sister, and had she not a strawberry mark on her left shoulder?

After lunch FrÄulein MÜller asked Nancy to her room, and she held Anne-Marie on her lap, and had to say the baby rhyme, "Da hast du 'nen Thaler, geh' auf den Markt" about fifty times, with the accompanying play on Anne-Marie's pink, outstretched palm, before she was allowed to talk to Nancy. Then she told them all about the years she had passed in an American family after leaving the Grey House, and about the little house she had just rented on Staten Island—a tiny little house in a garden, where she was going to live for the rest of her life. She was furnishing it now, and it would be ready next week.

"You must come to see it. You must stay with me there," said FrÄulein MÜller, looking for a dry spot on the sodden handkerchief. "Oh, meine kleine Nancy! My little Genius! Und was ist mit der Poesie?"

The following week FrÄulein MÜller left Lexington Avenue for her "Gartenhaus," as she called it, and three days later Nancy and Anne-Marie went to stay with her for a fortnight.

"What for an education has the child?" inquired the old governess, when Anne-Marie had been put to bed after a day of wonders. What? Strawberries grew on plants? Anne-Marie had always thought they came in baskets.

"She seems to know nothing," said FrÄulein MÜller. "I tried her with a little arithmetic. Did she know the metric system? Oh yes, she said she did, and wanted to speak about something else. But I kept her to it," said FrÄulein sternly, "and asked her: 'What are millimetres?' Do you know what the child said? She said that she supposed they were relations of the centipedes!"

Nancy laughed, and told FrÄulein MÜller about the Sixth Avenue School. FrÄulein clasped horrified hands.

"I will educate her myself. I suppose she is also a genius."

"No, I am afraid not," said Nancy, shaking her head regretfully. "I wish she were!"

The two women were silent; and from the little bedroom upstairs, through the open window, came Anne-Marie's voice, like tinkling water.

"She is singing," said FrÄulein MÜller.

"Oh yes; she always sings herself to sleep. She likes music." And Nancy told her about the violin.

"We shall buy her a violin to-morrow," said FrÄulein MÜller.

And so she did. The violin was new and bright and brown; it was labelled "Guarnerius," and cost three dollars. Anne-Marie pushed the bow up and down on it with great pleasure for a short time. Then she became very impatient, and took it out into the garden, and looked for a large stone.

"...It made ugly voices at me," she said, standing small and unrepentant by the broken brown pieces, while FrÄulein MÜller and Nancy shook grieved heads at her.

"I do not think that music is her vocation after all," said FrÄulein MÜller. "But we shall see."