He applied to several individuals who had always been on terms of great intimacy with his family, but after some had refused to receive him, and others had ignored his request with a forced smile, he felt paralysed, and resigned himself for a while to melancholy, brooding inactivity. There must come a change sooner or later, he thought. In the meanwhile he lived upon--debt, and could not comprehend why professional usurers should need so much urging to induce them to lend him, the probable heir of Schneeburg, a paltry couple of hundred gulden. Had he been more exactly informed of his father's circumstances, this would not have surprised him so much. But he had heard nothing of the old Count for years. A strange repugnance had prevented his speaking of him to strangers,--it would only expose his own unfortunate estrangement from his father to their indiscreet curiosity. Every day he had a secret hope, although he hardly admitted it to himself, that the old Count would take pity upon him, and suddenly appear providentially. But his father did not appear, and thus it was that finally he, Fritz Malzin, with his wife and children occupied two dingy third-story rooms in Leopold street, rented from his mother-in-law, who kept a lodging-house for gentlemen. Charlotte from morning until night bewailed her husband's unconscionable heedlessness, but in reality she was much happier than in Wipling street. To lounge about all the morning in a slatternly dishabille, to help prepare the breakfast for the lodgers, to gossip a little and flirt a little, and then in the evenings to array herself in the finery which she had contrived to smuggle into her present quarters, and to go to Ronacher's or some other beer-garden, where half a dozen second and third-rate coxcombs addressed her as 'Frau Countess,' and paid court to her,--such a life was bliss after the tedium of her former existence. She went out every evening, leaving Fritz at home with the children, revolving all kinds of improbable possibilities which might suddenly improve his condition, and devising schemes dependant upon lucky accidents that never happened. Sometimes a little warm hand was thrust into his; and a soft voice whispered to him: "Papa, tell me a story!" Then rousing himself from his sad reveries, he would try to make up some merry tale, but Siegi would shake his head, and nestling close to his father with his arms clinging about his neck and his head leaning against his father's cheek would beg, "Tell me about Schneeburg, Papa." The winter with its long nights wore on in close rooms poisoned by coal-gas, and pervaded by the cramping sensation of wretched confinement. Spring came; Siegi had lost his rosy cheeks, and his merry laugh. Every afternoon towards sunset his father took him out to walk. The child coughed a little.