"How do you mean?"

"Good heavens, to sit all evening without books and let the light burn in vain--that was not your wont heretofore."

"Oh, that's it. Ah well, one can't be poking in books all the time.

And for the past few days my eyes have been aching."

"With secret tears?" he teased.

She gave him a wide, serious look.

"With secret tears," she repeated.

"_Ah perfido_!" he trilled, in order to avoid the scene which he feared ... But he was on the wrong scent. She herself interrupted him with the question whether he would stay to supper.

He was curious to find the causes of the changes that he felt here.

For that reason and also because he was not without compunction, he consented to stay.

She rang and ordered a second cover to be laid.

Louise looked at her mistress with a disapproving glance and went.

"Dear me," he laughed, "the servants are against me ... I am lost."

"You have taken to noticing such things very recently." She gave a perceptible shrug.

"When a wife tells a husband of his newly acquired habits, he is doubly lost," he answered and gave her his arm.

The silver gleamed on the table ... the tea-kettle puffed out delicate clouds ... exquisitely tinted apples, firm as in Autumn, smiled at him.

A word of admiration escaped him. And then, once more, he saw that tragic smile on her lips--sad, wistful, almost compa.s.sionate.

"My darling," he said with sudden tenderness and caressed her shoulder.

She nodded and smiled. That was all.

At table her mood was an habitual one. Perhaps she was a trifle gentler. He attributed that to his approaching departure.

She drank a gla.s.s of Madeira at the beginning of the meal, the light Rhine wine she took in long, thirsty draughts, she even touched the brandy at the meal's end.

An inner fire flared in her. He suspected that, he felt it. She had touched no food. But she permitted nothing to appear on the surface.

On the contrary, the emotional warmth that she had shown earlier disappeared. The play of her thoughts grew cooler, clearer, more cutting, the longer she talked.

Twice or thrice quotations from Goethe were about to escape her, but she did not utter them. Smiling she tapped her own lips.

When he observed that she was really restraining a genuine impulse he begged her to consider the protest he had once uttered as merely a jest, perhaps even an ill-considered one. But she said: "Let be, it is as well."

They conversed, as they had often done, of the perished days of their old love. They spoke like two beings who have long conquered all the struggles of the heart and who, in the calm harbour of friendship, regard with equanimity the storms which they have weathered.

This way of speaking had gradually, and with a kind of jocular moroseness, crept into their intercourse. The exciting thing about it was the silent reservation felt by both: We know how different things could be, so soon as we desired. To-day, for the first time, this game at renunciation seemed to become serious.

"How strange!" he thought. "Here we sit who are dearest to each other in all the world and a kind of futile arrogance drives us farther and farther apart."

Alice arose.

He kissed her, as was his wont, upon hand and forehead and noted how she turned aside with a slight shiver. Then suddenly she took his head in both her hands and kissed him full on the lips with a kind of desperate eagerness.

"Ah," he cried, "what is that? It's more than I have a right to expect."

"Forgive me," she said, withdrawing herself at once. "We're poverty stricken folk and haven't much to give each other."

"After what I have just experienced, I'm inclined to believe the contrary."

But she seemed little inclined to draw the logical consequences of her action. Quietly she gave him his wonted cigarette, lit her own, and sat down in her old place. With rounded lips she blew little clouds of smoke against the table-cover.

"Whenever I regard you in this manner," he said, carefully feeling his way, "it always seems to me that you have some silent reservation, as though you were waiting for something." "It may be," she answered, blushing anew, "I sit by the way-side, like the man in the story, and think of the coming of my fate."

"Fate? What fate?"

"Ah, who can tell, dear friend? That which one foresees is no longer one's fate!"

"Perhaps it's just the other way."

She drew back sharply and looked past him in tense thoughtfulness.

"Perhaps you are right," she said, with a little mysterious sigh. "It may be as you say."

He was no wiser than he had been. But since he held it beneath his dignity to a.s.sume the part of the jealous master, he abandoned the search for her secrets with a shrug. The secrets could be of no great importance. No one knew better than himself the moderateness of her desires, no lover, in calm possession of his beloved, had so little to fear as he....

They discussed their plans for the Summer. He intended to go to the North Sea in Autumn, an old affection attracted her to Thuringia. The possibility of their meeting was touched only in so far as courtesy demanded it.

And once more silence fell upon the little drawing-room. Through the twilight an old, phantastic Empire clock announced the hurrying minutes with a hoa.r.s.e tick.

In other days a magical mood had often filled this room--the presage of an exquisite flame and its happy death. All that had vibrated here.

Nothing remained. They had little to say to each other. That was what time had left.

He played thoughtfully with his cigarette. She stared into nothingness with great, dreamy eyes.

And suddenly she began to weep ...

He almost doubted his own perception, but the great glittering tears ran softly down her smiling face.

But he was satiated with women's tears. In the fleeting amatory adventures of the past weeks and months, he had seen so many--some genuine, some sham, all superfluous. And so instead of consoling her, he conceived a feeling of sarcasm and nausea: "Now even she carries on!"....

The idea did indeed flash into his mind that this moment might be decisive and pregnant with the fate of the future, but his horror of scenes and explanations restrained him.

Wearily he a.s.sumed the att.i.tude of one above the storms of the soul and sought a jest with which to recall her to herself. But before he found it she pressed her handkerchief to her eyes and slipped from the room.

"So much the better," he thought and lit a fresh cigarette, "If she lets her pa.s.sion spend itself in silence it will pa.s.s the more swiftly."

Walking up and down he indulged in philosophic reflections concerning the useless emotionality of woman, and the duty of man not to be infected by it ... He grew quite warm in the proud consciousness of his heart's coldness.