Perhaps you will wonder at my childishness. Sometimes I wondered at it myself. But the wound still smarted, and something stronger than I seemed to withhold me from again breaking the ice. Besides, those long lonely days, and those nights, almost as long in the retrospect, when I lay sleepless on my bed, had shown me I had been drifting into another peril no less dangerous than dependence. I had been thinking too much of the girl for my own good, and our separation had brought me to a sudden realisation of how deeply I was beginning to care for her. I hated her, too, the pitiless wretch, so there was a double reason for me not to go back. One night as I had dressed to dine out and stepped into the street, looking up at the snow that hid the stars and silenced one's footsteps on the pavement, a woman emerged from the gloom, and before I knew what she was doing, had caught my arm. I shook her off, thinking her a beggar or something worse, and would have passed on my way had she not again struggled to detain me. I stopped, and was on the point of roughly ordering her to let me go, when I looked down into her veiled face and saw that it was Teresa Grossensteck. "Hugo!" she said. "Hugo!" I could only repeat her name and regard her helplessly. "Hugo," she said, "I am cold. Take me upstairs. I am chilled through and through." "Oh, but Teresa," I expostulated, "it wouldn't be right. You know it wouldn't be right. You might be seen." She laid her hand, her ungloved, icy hand, against my cheek. "I have been here an hour," she said. "Take me to your rooms. I am freezing." I led her up the stairs and to my little apartment. I seated her before the fire, turned up the lights, and stood and looked at her. "What have you come here for?" I said. "I've paid your father-- paid him a month ago." She made no answer, but spread her hands before the fire and shivered in the glow. She kept her eyes fixed on the coals in front of her and put out the tips of her little slippered feet. Then I perceived that she was in a ball gown and that her arms were bare under her opera cloak. At last she broke the silence. "How cheerless your room is," she said, looking about. "Oh, how cheerless!" "Did you come here to tell me that?" I said. "No," she said. "I don't know why I came. Because I was a fool, I suppose--a fool to think you'd want to see me. Take me home, Hugo." She rose as she said this and looked towards the door. I pressed her to take a little whiskey, for she was still as cold as death and as white as the snow queen in Hans Andersen's tale, but she refused to let me give her any. "Take me home, please," she repeated.