Regina Sussmann was always on hand when he gave a concert. He knew it, even if he did not see her. At times he caught sight of her sitting in the front row. She never approached him. Articles redolent with adulation appeared in the papers about him: it was manifest that she had been influential in having them written. Once he met her on the steps of a hotel. She stopped and cast her eyes to the ground; she was pale. He passed by her. Again he was filled with longing to come into intimate contact with an untouched woman. Was his heart already hungry, as she had predicted? He bit his lips, and worked throughout the whole night. He felt that he was being fearfully endangered by the prosy insipidity of the age and the world he was living in. But could he not escape the terrors of such without having recourse to a woman? The shadows receded, enveloped in sorrow, Gertrude and Eleanore, wrapped in the embrace of sisters. “Don’t!” they cried. He saw at once that his provincial concerts were leading him to false goals, enflaming false ambitions, robbing him of his strength. He no longer found it possible to endure the sight of brilliantly lighted halls, and the over-dressed people who came empty and left untransformed. It all seemed to him like a lie. He desisted; he threw it all overboard just as the temptation was strongest, just as the Berlin Philharmonic invited him to give a concert of his own works in its hall. He had suddenly disappeared. In less than three months his name had become a saga. VI He spent the summer, autumn, and winter of 1893 wandering around. Now he was in a remote Thuringian village, now in some town in the Rhön region, now in the mountains of Saxony, now in a fishing village on the Baltic. Throughout the day he worked on his manuscripts, in the evening he composed. No one except the members of the firm of Philander and Sons knew where he was. He did not dare hide himself from the people who were sending him the cheque at the end of the month. He gradually became so unaccustomed to talking that it was only with difficulty that he could ask a hotel-keeper about the price of his room. This unrelieved silence chiselled his lips into ghastly sharpness. He never heard from his mother or his children. He seemed to have forgotten that there were human beings living who thought of him with affection and anxiety. The only messages he received from the world were letters that were forwarded to him at intervals of from four to five weeks by the musical firm in Mayence. These letters were written by Regina Sussmann, though they were not signed in her name: the signature at the close of each one was “The Swallow.” She addressed Daniel by the familiar _Du_, and not by the more conventional and polite _Sie_.