"You can't fail to understand, without any further explanations on my part, that it amuses me enormously to see our youngster Felix, whom I imagined to be wandering about God knows where, a sighing and rejected suitor, suddenly turn up next door to us. Do you mean to tell me that chance has arranged all this so skillfully? Pooh, pooh!--you can't cheat me. I tell you he has been traveling after us, and has secretly followed his old flame, whom he still worships, into the primeval forests of Starnberg and across the tempestuous lake of Wuerm; and, since there was no other way of making up to you again with any self-respect, he has adopted the very wisest course, and one that never fails in its effect upon you soft-hearted souls, namely, that of creeping into your sympathy by means of a few ounces of spilt blood, of which article, by-the-way, he still possesses a very fair abundance. And now--" "Unless you want me to leave the room, uncle, spare me these perfectly groundless insinuations. Have I not told you that he had no suspicion of our plan to make a stay in Munich, and that Schnetz told me how he entered a studio with his old friend Jansen, with the intention of becoming a sculptor? But even if it were all just as you have arranged it in your own mind--what difference would it make in my resolution? Hasn't this unfortunate meeting proved the truth of all that I said to myself when I gave him back his promise?--has it not confirmed my belief that we could never be happy together? And yet, you imagine I would think differently of him because he now lies dangerously ill, and perhaps dying, of wounds which were undoubtedly given him by his rival, that peasant fellow--in a fight--about a tavern-waiter--" Her voice failed her; she turned away to repress her tears; but her passionate pain overcame her, and, bursting into uncontrollable sobbing, she sank back on a chair near the open door leading on to the balcony. Even the jovial mood of her good-hearted foster-father was not proof against this passionate outburst of long-suppressed feeling. He had always regarded the girl's self-possessed bearing with amazement, and had secretly attributed to her a certain coldness of heart, for she had never given him an insight into the struggles and storms of her young life. And now she sat before him like a child that has given way to its grief, deaf, apparently, to all comforting words and caresses.