The good-hearted Finkenbein, coming gradually to suspect that all manner of ghosts were closing in upon the manufacturer, sometimes gave him an encouraging word, or clapped him on the shoulder with a consoling laugh. "I say, Mr. Councillor, you oughtn't to study so much. You're quite clever enough--in your time you got the best of plenty of rich and clever people, didn't you? Don't be cross, millionaire--I don't mean any harm. It's just my little joke--man, think of the holy text up over your bed!" And he would spread out his arms with a pastoral dignity, as if in blessing, and recite with unction, "Little children, love one another!" "Or, wait a bit," he would say again, "we'll start a savings-bank, and when it's full we'll buy from the town its shabby poorhouse, and take the sign out and make the old "Sun" rise again, so as to get some oil into the machine once more. What do you say to that?" "If we only had five thousand marks--" Hürlin would begin to reckon; but the others would laugh, and he would break off, heave a sigh, and return to his brooding. When winter had fully come, they saw him getting more silent and restless. He had fallen into the habit of wandering in and out of the room, sometimes grim, sometimes with a look of terror, sometimes with one of watchful cunning. Otherwise he disturbed nobody. Holdria often kept him company, falling into step with him in his incessant wanderings through the room, and answering to the best of his powers the glances, gestures, and sighs of the restless rambler, always fleeing before the evil spirits whom he could not escape because he carried them with him. Since all his life he had loved to play a deceiver's part and played it with varying luck, now he was condemned to play through to a desperately sad end with his harlequin-like manners. He played miserably and absurdly enough--but at least the role corresponded to himself, and the former poseur now for the first time came on the stage without his mask, not to his advantage. The realization of the infinite and the eternal, the longing for the inexpressible, innate in this soul as in others but neglected and forgotten through a whole lifetime, found now, when it swelled up, no outlet, and attempted to express itself in grimaces, gestures, and tones of the strangest kind, absurdly and laughably enough. But there was a real power behind it all; and the uncomprehending desire for death was certainly the first great and, in the higher sense, rational movement which this small soul had known for years.