"It's easy to see whom one is visiting," said Felix, laughing. "'His pig-tail hangs behind him,' or have you had it cut off?" Then, without waiting for an answer: "But tell me, old fellow, how have you had the heart to leave your poor Icarus all these terribly long years without a sign of life on your part? Haven't any of the six or eight letters I have written you--the last only a year ago from Chicago--" The sculptor had turned away and buried his face in a bunch of full-blown roses. He turned suddenly toward his friend, and said, with a quick, lowering glance: "A sign of life! How do you know that I _have_ lived these terribly long years? But let us drop all that. Come and sit down here in the arbor, and now unpack your budget. A circumnavigator like you must have brought all manner of things with you that are entertaining and wonderful to dusty stay-at-homes like us. When you went away from Kiel, we did not either of us think the earth would turn so often before we looked each other in the face again." "What shall I tell you?" asked the young man, and his delicate brow contracted, "If my letters reached you, you have not lost the thread of my story. As for all the details that belong to it, you knew me well enough in my first university days, in those old times at Kiel, to imagine how I went on afterward in Heidelberg and Leipsic, till I got an older head under my corps-student's cap. It is true, I soon grew tired of the ridiculous corps business; but, for the mere sake of not seeming to play the renegade, I kept on with the old associations even more shamelessly than before. My three years passed away, and a fourth beside; I was fully three-and-twenty when I went back into my dear, dull, little home, and passed my examination to enter the civil service. How I managed to get on so long without giving you a call, Heaven knows! As early as the second year after our separation, I was very near you. I had a trifling reminder of a pistol-duel with a Russian, here in my left shoulder, and had to go to a watering-place for my health. In Heligoland I heard that you had moved to Hamburg. I needn't say that I designed to call upon you on my way back. But, suddenly, a sad message called me home abruptly. My poor old father had had an apoplectic stroke, and I found him dead. Then there was all the dreary necessary business, and, after it all--. But why must we spoil our first pleasant hour with all these old stories? My dear Hans, if you had a notion how good it is to be sitting here again by your side, to smell these roses, and imagine that my life is beginning all over again--a new life in a better world, free from all fetters and--. But, by-the-way, you have married, I hear? An actress, was it not? Where did she come from? I heard in Heligoland--"