"How should I? He certainly would never tell me." "Of course not! We had not seen each other for years, but he came to see me as soon as he knew that I was at Schneeburg, and asked me if he could do anything for me. I thought it kind, but did not take his words seriously and so thanked him and assured him he could do nothing. He came again, bringing presents for the children with kind messages from his mother, and asked me to dinner. When we retired to the smoking-room after that dinner he said to me with the embarrassed manner of a generous man, about to confer a benefit: 'Fritz, tell me frankly; does no old debt annoy you?' Of course, at first I did not want to confess, but at last I admitted that a couple of unliquidated accounts did trouble me. An unstained name is a luxury that is the hardest of all to forego. He arranged everything, and now I am perfectly free from debt. He has such a charming way of giving, as if it were the merest pastime. I once asked him how a man as happy as he, found so much time to think for others? He answered that happiness was like a rose-bush, the more blossoms one gives away, the more it flourishes!" "Yes, yes, he certainly is a fine fellow.--We quarrel sometimes, but he is a very fine fellow!" said Truyn, "he suits the child--you must know her. And what about your children? Ossi says they are very pretty--you have three, have you not?" "No, only two," Fritz replied, and his voice trembled as he took a little photograph from the wall--"only two; my eldest died. Look at him--" handing the picture to Truyn, "he was a pretty child, was he not?--my poor little Siegi--but too lovely, too good for the life that had fallen to his lot. He is better dead--better!" he uttered in the hard tone in which the reason asserts what the heart denies. From the park the vague, dreamy fragrance of the fading white rocket was wafted into the room. The light flickered dimly through the leafy screen of the apricot tree before the open window that looked out upon the vegetable garden. On Fritz's writing-table the old Empire clock, wheezing in its struggle for breath, struck five times. Truyn knew the old timepiece well, but formerly it used to swing its pendulum as merrily on into eternity as if it expected a fresh delight every hour. It seemed as if by this time it had almost lost its voice from grief, so asthmatic was the sob with which it counted the seconds. And not only with the clock, with everything around him Truyn was familiar. The entire shabby apartment betrayed a fanatical worship of the past. The chairs were the same monstrosities with lyre-shaped backs and crooked legs, which had been wont to endure the angry kicks of the little Malzins, when their tutor kept them too long at their lessons. Even the pattern of the wall-paper, with its apocryphal birds and butterflies among impossible wreaths of flowers, was the same which a travelling house-painter had pasted up there thirty years before.