He stopped again. His friend's silence seemed to check his utterance. For a time nothing was to be heard around them but the splashing of the little fountain, and from the window above them the notes of the battle-painter's flute, every little while dying dismally away. Suddenly the sculptor stood still. "And does your fiancée agree to this project?" "My fiancée? What in the world puts that question into your head?" "Because, although I never answered your letters, I remember them all very well. Is it possible that you too do not remember what you wrote me three years ago, under the seal of the deepest--" "So I did do it then!" cried the young man with a short, abrupt laugh. "So I did chatter, did I? I assure you, my dear Hans, I was myself doubtful how far I had initiated you--you, the only one before whom I ever lifted even a corner of the veil from this veiled picture. After awhile--as you sent no congratulations--I began to persuade myself that I had kept a quiet tongue in my head, even with you; and, in truth, that would have been the best thing to do. Then I should have escaped the full confession that it is hard enough for me to make--and after all, it is perfectly superfluous. For how shall I--who am no poet, and who am besides an interested party in the transaction--how shall I describe the persons concerned so that you will understand how it all came about--how it was partly the fault of both--and yet how both are innocent, after all? "But if you must have it, let it be so--as briefly as possible. "I came back, then, to my native town, to pay the last honors to my good old father. You know what an unhomelike home I had always found it. The capital of a third-class Duodezstaat--thank your good star that you have no idea what it means. My father before me had suffered under the absurd despotism of this court-etiquette, this endlessly-branching, complicated, spun-out primeval jungle of dry genealogical trees--under these ridiculous traditions of a worm-eaten bureaucracy. He was a man of quite another type--a sturdy, stately country noble, of the most exclusive and most independent spirit; and since the death of my mother--who could not of course withdraw herself so entirely from her family connections--he had lived on our own estate, altogether apart from 'society.' Then came his death; and I--looked upon askance even as a boy because of my likeness to my father, and almost given up as far as a career at court or in politics was concerned--I believe no cock would have crowed at it, if I had once for all acknowledged that I was my father's true heir in this respect also, and had forever turned my back on the spot where I was cradled. But, much as I felt inclined to do so, it fell out otherwise." He put his hand into his pocket and took out a little memorandum-book.