"Well, I'm a coward for all that. I'm frightened, always frightened. The doctors don't know it, because I never tell them. But I always am...." "But of what, my dear chap?" "Of something inside myself. Look here, Herman, I'm so afraid ... that I shall not be able to stick it out. That at a given moment of my life I shall be too weak. That suddenly I shall not be able to act and then, then ..." He shuddered; they look at each other. "It won't do," he continued, mechanically, as though strengthened by Herman's glance. "I shall fight against it, against that dread of mine.... Do you believe in presentiments?" "Yes, inversely: mine always turn out the opposite!" "Then I hope that my presentiment won't come true either." "But what is it?" "That within the year ... one of us ... at Lipara ... will be dead." Herman stared at him fixedly. For all his manliness and his muscular strength, there lay deep down within him a certain heritage of the superstition that comes murmuring from the sea as with voices of distant prophecy, a superstition lulled by the beautiful legends of their Gothlandic sea, which, syren-like, sings strange, mystic fairy-tales. Perhaps he had never until this moment felt that some of it flowed in his rich blood; and he tried to shake it off as nonsense: "But Othomar, do be rational!" he said. "I can do nothing to prevent it, Herman. I don't think about it, but I feel little sharp stings, like thoughts suddenly springing up. And lately ... oh, lately, it has been worse; it has become a dream, a nightmare! I was walking through the shopping-streets of Lipara and from all the shops came black people and they measured out bales of black crape, with yard-measures, till the streets were filled with it and the crape lay in the town as though in clouds and surged over the town like a mass of black muslin. It made everything dark: the sun could not shine through it and everything lay in shadow. The people did not seem to recognize me and, when I asked what all that crape was for, they whispered in my ears, 'Hush, hush, it's ... it's for the Imperial!' ... O Herman, then I woke and I was damp with perspiration and it was as though I still heard it echoing after me: 'For the Imperial, it's for the Imperial!'" Herman got up; he was a little nervous: "Come," said he, "shall we go?... Dreams: don't pay any attention to dreams, Othomar!" Othomar also rose: "No, I oughtn't to pay attention to them," he repeated, in a strange tone. "I never used to." "Othomar," Herman began, decidedly, as though he wished to say something. "Don't talk to me for a minute; let me be for a moment," Othomar interrupted, quickly, anxiously. They walked through the woods in silence. Othomar looked about him, strangely, looked at the ground. Herman compressed his lips tightly and puckered up his forehead: he was annoyed. But he said nothing. In a few minutes Othomar's strange glances grew calmer and quieted down into their usual gentle melancholy.