"He has been travelling these ten years," replied Mr. Bemperlein. "Three years ago Frau von Berkow, the two Barnewitz, met him in Rome, and then they travelled together through Southern Italy. In Sicily they parted again. My friends prepared to return home, but the baron went on to Egypt, Arabia, and heaven knows where else his restless spirit has driven him. But we have again lost sight of our subject." Mr. Bemperlein began his tale once more with his inexhaustible fund of details; but if Oswald had before only listened with one ear, his thoughts now were far away. That, then, was the man who had played so prominent a part in Melitta's life! So great a part! How great a part? She had never really loved him--perhaps--no, certainly never loved him--but is true love always the last reward of a woman's highest favor? Is there no such thing as desire without love? Or love without desire? Only a wish to hold him captive by all means, among them, by the memory of pleasure enjoyed. Has she ever been happy by the side of this man, at whose cradle the graces had failed to appear; happy, though not perfectly so, not as happy as she had hoped, but still? Oh! that thought brought intolerable torment! The demon of jealousy was whispering and hissing bad thoughts in his ear, which made his blood boil and big drops of perspiration to break out on his forehead--no wonder, then, that he heard Mr. Bemperlein's tale only in a dream. This only he understood, that the strange man had only now begun to think of his so-called science, his long-cherished profession only now, when all the troubles of life seemed to be ended, and he could breathe, a free man, in the green solitude of Berkow. He had now only begun to make the acquaintance of the heroes of modern literature, especially of Shakespeare; and from the poets he had passed to the philosophers, here again above all in Spinoza finding a new world opening before him which he had not suspected in his scholastic studies. Under such influence he had been led to the study of nature, to botany, mineralogy, and physics; he had built himself, with old Baumann's aid, a small laboratory, where he had industriously pursued his new sciences, and there, alas! he had found, amid phials and retorts, that his orthodox faith, as far as the reading of the philosophers had not destroyed it already, had altogether evaporated!