Page:T.M. Royal Highness.djvu/203

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IMMA
187

"Spa Court," whose bellows he got a hotel servant to blow, and he could be heard from the Spa Garden playing it for an hour every day.

He had married for love and not at all from social considerations, according to the Courier—a poor and pretty girl, half German, half Anglo-Saxon by descent. She had died, but she had left him a daughter, that wonderful blood-mixture of a girl, whom we now had as guest within our walls and who was at the time nineteen years old. Her name was Imma—a real German name, as the Courier added, nothing more than an old form of "Emma," and it might be remarked that the daily conversation in the Spoelmann household, though interlarded with scraps of English, had remained German. And how devoted father and daughter seemed to be to each other! Every morning, by going to the Spa Garden at the right time, one could watch Fraulein Spoelmann, who usually entered the Fiillhause a little later than her father, take his head between her hands and give him his morning kiss on mouth and cheeks, while he patted her tenderly on the back. Then they went arm-in-arm through the Wandelhalle and sucked their glass tubes as they went.…

That is how the well-informed journal gossiped and fed the public curiosity. It also reported carefully the visits which Miss Imma kindly paid with her companion to several of the charitable institutions of the town. Yesterday she had made a detailed inspection of the public kitchens. To-day she had made a prolonged tour of the Trinity Almshouses for old women, and she had recently twice attended Privy Councillor Klinghammer's lectures on the theory of numbers at the university—had sat on the bench, a student among students, and scribbled away with her fountain-pen, for everybody knew that she was a learned girl and devoted to the study of algebra. Yes, all that was absorbing reading, and furnished ample food for