The doctor sat the vase so violently down upon the writing-table as to break it. "I wish our whole military strength might be brought to bear against this obstinate lieutenant, and force him to come home!" he cried angrily. "And so he is not to return to us! He went away as a sick man, whose life we half despaired of; and now, when he might come back healthy, honored, admired by all the world, he will not come. Doctor Behrend, there is some hidden reason for all this! He might have come with you if he had chosen, but he really flies from B. Why did he always make his military duties an excuse for absence, and now that they are ended, why will he persist in remaining away! Something has happened. Tell me what it is." "I know nothing about it," replied Doctor Behrend evasively. "Perhaps he dislikes the ovation which awaits him here. You know he could never endure being placed in the foreground." "Nonsense!" cried the doctor furiously. "He must now step to the foreground. We tolerated that anxious timidity in the scholar; but now when he has launched out under full sail as a poet, we forbid all such whims!" Behrend shook his head. "Do not cherish too great hopes as to Walter's poetic future," he said. "I very much fear that with the sword, he will also lay aside the poets, then bury himself among his books, shut himself out from the outside world more vexatiously than ever, and in a year's time stand just where he did at the opening of the war." "He will not do that!" cried the horrified doctor. "He will; it would just suit his fancy. With all his genius, Walter remains an incorrigible dreamer; his energy is only an impulse of the moment. In moments of excitement and inspiration such natures do and dare all; as soon as the incitement is wanting, they sink back again into their dreaming. Life in its every-day dress is nothing to them, simply because they do not understand it." "And a delightful thing it must be to dream away one's life," cried the doctor excitedly pacing up and down. "Sensible men like you and me, Doctor Behrend, haven't the least idea of the nonsensical things that haunt such a learned, poetic head as Walter Fernow's." "He needs a spur to effort," replied the doctor, gravely. "He needs an energetic, ardent force to remain daily and hourly at his side, and wrest him from that ideal life, to animate him for the conflict with the world and give him what he does not possess; ambition and self-confidence. If this were granted him, I believe there is no height he might not attain in the long future yet before him. But if an unhappy passion once comes to such a nature--" Here Doctor Stephen suddenly wheeled around, and with supreme astonishment gazed into his colleague's face. "An unhappy passion!" he cried. "For Heaven's sake, our professor has not fallen in love!" Behrend bit his lips in vexation. "Oh, not at all! It only occurred to me as a mere supposition."