Here he lay; and if his manliness had not forbidden him, he would have liked nothing better than to relieve himself by a flood of burning tears, like a helpless, unhappy child, to whom some one has shown its favorite plaything and then taken it away again. Instead of yielding to such girlish weakness, he strengthened and stilled his rebellious heart with that defiant spirit which is the man's form of this youthful feebleness. He gnashed his teeth, cast threatening glances up at the tree-tops and the blue dome of the sky, and behaved himself generally in a way so boyish, and so unworthy of the great statesman that Schnetz believed he had detected in him, that even his horse, hearing his wild, disconnected words, and the strange gnashing and raving by which they were accompanied, looked up in amazement from his grazing, and turned his head toward his rider with an expression of silent pity. "Is it any fault of mine," he raved to himself, "that a ridiculous accident has brought her to the very spot where I was on the point of beginning a new life? Must I fly before her, like a fool, the moment this absurd fate brings her near me again? The world is surely large enough for us both; and yet now, though she knows why I have pitched my tent in this particular place, she persists in haunting the immediate neighborhood, so that I can't take a step outside the gates without running the risk of meeting her. What am I saying? Why, I do not dare even to go out to the lake! I am to be cut off from light and air, and left to smother in the Munich dust! In other words, I am to condemn myself to perpetual imprisonment for a crime of which I do not even repent. No! I owe something to myself as well. Why shouldn't I show that I have put the whole affair behind me once for all, and go on living as though certain eyes were no longer in the world? Cannot one person ignore another? Shall it last forever, this fear of ghosts? As if one couldn't go around a street corner without meeting a dead and buried love!"--he sprang up suddenly, smoothed his hair, and brushed the dust from his coat--"and though her eyes should look down upon me from every window in Starnberg," he cried, "I will ride through the town and laugh at all these apparitions!" So he swung himself into the saddle again, and rode over the few remaining miles of his journey at a sharp trot. When at last a blue strip of the lake sparkled through the tree-tops, and the houses of the town came into view, a gray, starlit twilight had already settled down; so that, after all, he could ride through the streets between the rows of lighted windows, without any fear of being recognized.