Turning at one of the four corners of the colonnade, he suddenly recoils. On a fragmentary wall-ruin there sits one of the girls who met death here in the Villa of Diomede; but that attempt to take refuge again in the realm of madness is soon put aside; no, it is Gradiva, who has apparently come to give him the last bit of her treatment. She interprets rightly his first instinctive movement to flee, as an attempt to leave the place, and points out to him that he cannot escape, for outside a frightful cloudburst is in progress. The merciless girl begins the examination with the question as to what he intended in connection with the fly on her hand. He does not find courage to make use of a definite pronoun, but acquires the more valuable kind needed to put the deciding question. “I was—as they say—somewhat confused mentally and ask pardon that I—the hand—in that way—how I could be so stupid, I can’t understand—but I can’t understand either how its owner could use my name in upbraiding me for my—my madness.” (_G._ p. 98.) “Your power of understanding has not yet progressed that far, Norbert Hanold. Of course, I cannot be surprised, for you have long ago accustomed me to it. To make that discovery again, I should not have needed to come to Pompeii, and you could have confirmed it for me a good hundred miles nearer.” “A good hundred miles nearer; diagonally across from your house, in the corner house; in my window, in a cage, is a canary,” she discloses to the still bewildered man. This last word touches the hero like a memory from afar. That is surely the same bird whose song has suggested to him the trip to Italy. “In that house lives my father, Richard Bertgang, professor of zoology.” As his neighbour, therefore, she is acquainted with him and his name. It seems as if the disappointment of a superficial solution is threatening us—a solution unworthy of our expectations. As yet Norbert Hanold shows no regained independence of thought, when he repeats, “Then are you—are you Miss Zoë Bertgang? But she looked quite different——” Miss Bertgang’s answer shows then that other relations besides those of neighbourliness have existed between them. She knows how to intercede for the familiar manner of address, which he has, of course, used to the noonday spirit, but withdrawn again from the living girl; she makes former privileges of use to her here. “If you find that form of address more suitable between us, I can use it too, you know, but the other came to me more naturally. I don’t know whether I looked different when we used to run about before with each other as friends, every day, and occasionally beat and cuffed each other for a change, but if, in recent years, you had favoured me with even one glance you might perhaps have seen that I have looked like this for a long time.”