Soon afterwards Battista Delcor was apprenticed to a chemist in the town, and the cup of his content was filled to the brim; but as yet, neither his mother nor Herr Ritter told him the name of his unknown friend. Then it grew towards the end of summer, and the ferns and the brake began to tarnish in the woodlands, and Dolores Delcor sickened, and failed, and whitened more and more from day to day, till at last she could do no work at all, but lived only at the hands of 'Tista and Herr Ritter. As for me, I blossomed still in the balcony beneath the green verandah, looking always into the dark studio, and noting how, one by one, the tall musty books upon the old German's shelves were bartered away for gold. But one morning, just at dawn, the woman of that sorrowful name and dolorous life passed away into her rest, while she slept. And when 'Tista, with his heart almost breaking for grief, came at the hour of sunrise to tell Herr Ritter that she was dead, the old man looked out across the hazy blue of the eastern reaches at the sea of golden splendour breaking beyond them, and answered only in his quiet patient way, that he had known it could not be for long. I heard the words and understood them, but to the boy they meant nothing. Then there came a night when the shelves stood empty, save for the skull and the fossils, and Herr Ritter wore a strange luminous aspect upon his placid face, that was not of the shadows nor of the lights of earth. For five days he had broken no bread, and his strength had failed him for want and for age, and no friend had been to visit him. 'Tista, I suppose, had his business now, and of late his presence in the dark studio had become more and more rare; not that he was unkind, but that he was full of youth, and the vigorous love of youth; and the old man's talk was wearisome to ears that delighted in sounds of laughter and frolic. And besides all this, he did not know how much he owed to the old philosopher, for Herr Ritter still kept silence. All the autumn day had been sultry, and the wind seemed to have fallen asleep in some remote corner of the sky, for there had scarce been air enough to stir the feathery tassels of the pasture grasses, and the stillness of drought and heat had been everywhere unbroken. But when I looked towards the west at sundown, I saw that all the long low horizon was shrouded in twirling cumuli, with tops of lurid flame; and great shafts of red tempestuous light, shot upward from the dying sun, launched themselves over the heavens, and hung there like fiery swords above a city of doom.