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Yet had these been his only sorrows, and had he borne them–as he had hoped to bear them–with Christine, his lot would have been anything but hard. It was the deep heart-wound that he had suffered that made his life for many a year a very dreary one; too dreary for him to find much pleasure even in the singing of his birds. Now and again he met Christine. At their first meeting–in his uncle’s fine parlor over the fine delicatessen shop, one Sunday afternoon–she was, as she well might be, confused in her speech and very shamefaced in her ways. Her husband was with her, quite a prosperous person, so Andreas was told, who had built up a great business in the pork and sausage line. He was a loud-voiced, merry man; and he aired his wit freely, though evidently with no intent to be unkind, upon the lover out of whose lucklessness his own luck had come. Even as pretty a girl as Christine could not have more than one husband at a time, said this big Conrad, with great good-humor; and so, since they could not both marry her, Andreas would do well to stop crying over spilled milk. They all would be very good friends, he added, and Andreas would be godfather to the first child. He put out his big hand as he made this proffer of friendship; and although Andreas could not refuse to clasp it, there was not, in truth, any great store of friendliness for Christine’s loud-voiced husband in his heart. So soon as this was possible, he was glad to get away from the merry Sunday afternoon gathering in his uncle’s fine parlor to the more sympathetic society of his birds. Yet there did not seem to him much music in the singing of his birds that day.

Christine was vastly proud of her big, rosy-faced, noisy husband, whose sausage-making greatly prospered, and to whom the American dollars rolled in bravely. But even in these days of her good-luck she sometimes found herself thinking–when Conrad’s rough love-making was still further roughened, and his noisiness greatly increased, by too free draughts of heady German beer–of the gentler ways and constant tenderness of her earlier lover, whose love, with her own promise to be true to it, she had so lightly cast aside. Thoughts of this sort, it is true, did not often trouble her, but now and then they gave her a little heart-pang; and the pang would be intensified, sometimes, as the thought also would come to her that perhaps it was because she had broken her plighted troth that her many prayers to become a mother remained unanswered.

As time went on, Christine’s sorrows came to be of a more instant sort. Her too jolly husband’s fondness for heady beer grew upon him, and with its increase came a decrease in the success that until then had been attendent upon his sausage-making. His business fell away from him by degrees into soberer and steadier hands, which had the effect of making him take to stronger drinks than beer in order that he might the more effectually forget his troubles. He lost his merriness, and somewhat of his loudness, and became sullen; and the wolf always was shrewdly near the door. Thus, in a very bad way indeed, things went on for half a dozen years; then the big Conrad, what with drink and worry, fell ill–so ill, that for a long while he lay close to the open jaws of Death.

No one ever knew–though several people quite accurately guessed–why the wolf did not fairly get into the house during that dismal time. It is certain that when Conrad arose from his bed at last, a thin remnant of his former bigness, there were few high-priced birds left in Andreas Stoffel’s little shop, where there had been a score or more when his sickness began. And, possibly, it was something more than a mere coincidence that nearly all of the few which remained were sold about the time that Conrad started again, in a very humble way, his business of sausage-making.