“No.” He answered. But his heart knew better. “If thou hast not come to seek God, then thou hast nothing to seek here,” said the monk. Then Joh Fredersen’s son went. He went out of the cathedral as one walking in his sleep. The daylight smote his eyes cruelly. Racked with weariness, worn out with grief, he walked down the steps, and aimlessly onwards. The roar of the streets wrapped itself, as a diver’s helmet, about his ears. He walked on in his stupefaction, as though between thick glass walls. He had no thought apart from the name of his beloved, no consciousness apart from his longing for her. Shivering with weariness, he thought of the girl’s eyes and lips, with a feeling very like homesickness. Ah!—brow to brow with her—then mouth to mouth—eyes closed—breathing.... Peace.... Peace.... “Come,” said his heart. “Why do you leave me alone?” He walked along in a stream of people, fighting down the mad desire to stop amid this stream and to ask every single wave, which was a human being, if it knew of Maria’s whereabouts, and why she had let him wait in vain. He came to the magician’s house. There he stopped. He stared at a window. Was he mad? There was Maria, standing behind the dull panes. Those were her blessed hands, stretched out towards him ... a dumb cry: “Help me—!” Then the entire vision was drawn away, swallowed up by the blackness of the room behind it, vanishing, not leaving a trace, as though it had never been. Dumb, dead and evil stood the house of the magician there. Freder stood motionless. He drew a deep, deep breath. Then he made a leap. He stood before the door of the house. Copper-red, in the black wood of the door, glowed the seal of Solomon, the pentagram. Freder knocked. Nothing in the house stirred. He knocked for the second time. The house remained dull and obstinate. He stepped back and looked up at the windows. They looked out in their evil gloom, over and beyond him. He went to the door again. He beat against it with his fists. He heard the echo of his drumming blows shake the house, as in dull laughter. But the copper Solomon’s seal grinned at him from the unshaken door. He stood still for a moment. His temples throbbed. He felt absolutely helpless and was as near crying as swearing. Then he heard a voice—the voice of his beloved. “Freder—!” and once more: “Freder—!” He saw blood before his eyes. He made to throw himself with the full weight of his shoulders against the door.... But in that same moment the door opened noiselessly. It swung back in ghostly silence, leaving the way into the house absolutely free. That was so unexpected and alarming that, in the midst of the swing which was to have thrown him against the door, Freder caught both his hands against the door-posts, and stood fixed there. He buried his teeth in his lips. The heart of the house was as black as midnight.... But the voice of Maria called to him from the heart of the house: “Freder—! Freder—!”