His suspicions of Tarr at last awoke once more. What was the meaning of this Englishman always there? What was he there for? If it had not been for him, several times he would have rushed off and had his way. But he was always there between them. And in secret, too, probably, and away from him—Kreisler—he was working on Bertha’s feelings, and preventing her from seeing him. Tarr was anyhow the obstacle. And yet there he was, talking and palavering, and offering to act as an intermediary, and preventing him from acting. He alone was the obstacle, and yet he talked as though he were nothing to do with it, or at the most a casually interested third party. That is how Kreisler felt on his way home after having drunk a good deal. But so long as Tarr paid for drinks he staved him off his prey. CHAPTER V Tarr soon regretted this last anti-climax stage of his adventure. He would have left Kreisler alone in future, but he felt that by frequenting him he could save Bertha from something disagreeable. With disquiet and misgiving every night now he sat in front of his Prussian friend. He watched him gradually imbibing enough spirits to work him up to his pitch of characteristic madness. “After all, let us hear really what it all means, your Kreisler stunt, and Kreisler?” he said to her four or five days after his reappearance. “Do you know that I act as a dam, or rather a dyke, to his outrageous flood of liquorous spirits every night? Only my insignificant form is between you and destruction, or you and a very unpleasant Kreisler, at any rate.—Have you seen him when he’s drunk?—What, after all, does _Kreisler_ mean? Satisfy my curiosity.” Bertha shuddered and looked at him with dramatically wide-open eyes, as though there were no answer. “It’s nothing, Sorbert, nothing,” she said, as though Kreisler were the bubonic plague and she were making light of it. * * * * *