He did not venture to press a kiss on the proffered brow, but only took her hand. The great grave eyes gazed at him as though they would fain read what was passing in his inmost soul. "Good-night, dear child," he said hurriedly. "Good-night," she replied slowly, letting his hot, trembling hand glide out of her own cool little one. "It is lucky," said Bertram to himself, after he had dismissed Konski, and as he stood alone by the open window in his bedroom, "it is very lucky, indeed, that it is not very easy to read what is passing in somebody else's soul. She would have found queer reading!" He leaned out of the window and gazed into the darkness. Not a breath of air. From the garden below the fragrance of mignonette was wafted up; the brook murmured aloud; a thin white veil was spread over the valley, with here and there a dim speck of light. The sky was cloudless, of deep blue, almost black colour; the moon looked like a mass of gold, and one solitary star near it shone forth in red splendour. Bertram recalled just such a night, long years ago, when a friend, the assistant-astronomer, had given Erna's father and himself the opportunity of witnessing, from the Bonn Observatory, the transit of that same star--Aldebaran--through the moon! Afterwards he had accompanied Otto back to Poppelsdorf, and Otto had in his turn walked back with him to the Pförtchen in Bonn; and so backward and forward, all through the mild summer's night, until the light of morning had come, and the birds were beginning to twitter in the leafy crowns of the chestnut trees. And they had been raving of friendship and love--of the love they both, most fraternally, cherished for one and the same black-eyed beauty, the daughter of one of their professors, and they had both been sublimely happy, all their misery notwithstanding, for the black-eyed one was known to love another--"Great Heaven, how long, how long ago? A generation, and more. And now ...?" "Now," he went on, "you are about to fall in love with the daughter of the same man whom then you rivalled in absurdly exaggerated, donkey-like phantasies--with a girl of eighteen, whose father you could be. And this time you would not get off with raving incoherently for a night of two, and with scribbling a few mediocre sonnets! Be reasonable, old man. Let it go--let it go! You know full well you can have no abiding place here, any more than the horseman in the Piccolomini. Behind you, too, as you ride along, crouches the lean companion and clasps you in his bony arms, and every now and again taps at your heart, to test if it is still stupid enough to throb for a beauteous maiden who is seated by the window among wallflowers and rosemary.