Myles did not spend a long time over this meal. The table was soon clear again, with the exception of the indispensable bottle of yellow wine, and the accompanying green glass. He leaned his elbows upon the table before him and stared dreamily forward across the garden, beyond the groups of merry guests--young men and girls, and whole families, with _Vater_ and _Mutter_ in full amplitude; he seemed to see none of them. The band in the orchestra, fifty yards away, were playing soft strains; the lamps twinkled with a mild, pleasant brightness; the trees above them looked ink-black by contrast. The sky beyond was like a vault of violet crystal, and the lamp-like stars beamed out mildly here and there. The breeze rustled gently now and then, but it was a very gentle breeze, with nothing of the storm in its breath. All around was the hum of laughter and talk, and the murmur of flirtation; now and then the clanking of spurs and the rattling of swords as the company was reinforced ever and anon by fresh specimens of the inevitable lieutenant; it was all very pleasant, very calm and peaceful. Myles, somewhat languid after a long day’s business in the de-oxygenised atmosphere of the offices and warehouses of a large town, felt, at the moment, perfectly neutral; neither glad nor sorry, but content, so far as he was anything, to sit still, with his arms on the table, taking an occasional drink of his pleasant, if not strong, straw-coloured Neckar wine, and listening to the whispers of the band, as one instrument after another died away in the final bars of a little serenade of Haydn’s. He would have been content to stay there for an indefinite time, for Myles had arrived at that mental state in which a man finds it easiest and pleasantest to go on doing the same thing. Whether the thing were work or idlenesss was almost immaterial to him, when he had once begun it. It was the effort of turning his attention from one thing to another which brought mental pain and inconvenience. All day he had wrought hard, and asked nothing better than to continue doing so. So long as he could go on, he was almost at ease. But when the work was over--when the offices were closed, and men had finished their toil, and were going home to ‘play them’--to use an idiom of his own native dialect--then it was that despondency seized him; then it was that he felt a sudden blank, an emptiness, a sense of being lost and unprovided for; then it was that the effort to find some other pastime, something else with which to fill his thoughts, was a dull pang which he dreaded continually. It was this feeling of desolation that kept him sitting up till all hours of the night, with book and dictionary open before him, studying or reading until his eyelids fell over his weary eyes, and he could go upstairs, certain that he would fall asleep as soon as he tumbled into bed. It was this which made him dread to awaken in the night watches, or to lie awake with nothing to do; this that,