Bertram had remained sitting on the sofa, his hand pressed to his brow; he now rose rapidly and strode impatiently about the room, casting every now and then an angry glance at his valet. Then he stepped to one of the windows. The sun must be setting now. The high wooded hills yonder still shone forth in sunny splendour, but the terrace gardens sloping towards the valley, and the valley itself, with the village within, lay already in deepest shadow. The picturesque view, the graceful charm of which he was wont to appreciate so heartily, had no charm to-day for his dulled brain. Konski was quite right; the champagne which he had to-day taken for the first time since his illness, in direct defiance of the doctors injunctions, had not agreed with him. Well, he had taken champagne because his throat had got unbearably dry from much talking, and he had talked so much because the frequent pauses in the dinner conversation were making him nervous. The whole thing had been a positive bore; the genial host, the fair hostess had surely fallen off, changed sadly for the worse during the last three years. Or ... could he possibly have changed himself? Did he really begin to grow old? If you get seriously ill at fifty, you are apt to go downhill with startling rapidity! This had been the second emphatic _memento mori_--after an interval of twenty years! The first--the first had been her work. Aye, and she had kissed him a thousand times, and had vowed deathless fidelity yonder on the mountain-slope, where the giant oak still lifted its mighty crown of foliage above the bronze-coloured leafy roof of the beeches. Why the deuce did they always give him these rooms? He'd better ask Hildegard this very evening for other rooms--at once, before that blockhead Konski had unpacked everything. "Leave these things alone," he exclaimed, turning round from the window; "I do not intend to remain in these rooms. I do not intend to stay here at all, I think. We shall probably be off to-morrow." Konski, who was already deep in the recesses of box number two, believed he had not heard aright. He lifted his head out of the box and looked in amazement at his master. "To-morrow, sir? I thought we were to stay a week at the least." "Do what I bid you." Konski replaced, the shirts which he was holding in the portmanteau and rose hastily from his knees. His master was evidently in a very bad temper; "but that kind of thing never lasts long with him," Konski was saying to himself, "and then the champagne ..."