"How very serious you look!" she said gaily.
"It might have been serious for _you,_ Madame Fontaine, if Mr.Keller had returned to the house to fetch his opera-glass himself." "Ah! he has left his opera-glass behind him?
Let me help you to look for it.

I have done my sketch; I am quite at your service." She forestalled me in finding the opera-glass.

"I really had no other chance of making a study of the chimney-piece," she went on, as she handed the glass to me.
"Impossible to ask Mr.Engelman to let me in again, after what happened on the last occasion.

And, if I must confess it, there is another motive besides my admiration for the chimney-piece.

You know how poor we are.
The man who keeps the picture-shop in the Zeil is willing to employ me.
He can always sell these memorials of old Frankfort to English travelers.
Even the few forms he gives me will find two half-starved women in housekeeping money for a week." It was all very plausible; and perhaps (in my innocent days before I met with Frau Meyer) I might have thought it quite likely to be true.