As you will probably not find time before you leave the city to bid me farewell in person. I beg you to return to me a certain key which I gave into your keeping some years ago. You have no need of it and it worries me to have it lying about. Don't think that I am at all angry. My friendship and my gratitude are yours, however far and long we may be separated. When, some day, we meet again, we will both have become different beings. With many blessings upon your way, ALICE." He struck his forehead like a man who awakens from an obscene dream. Where was his mind? He was about to go in search of that which was so close at hand, so richly his own! Where else in all the world could he find a woman so exquisitely tempered to his needs, so intimately responsive to his desires, one who would lead him into the darker land of matrimony through meadows of laughing flowers? To be sure, there was her coolness of temper, her learning, her strange restlessness. But was not all that undergoing a change? Had he not found her sunk in dreams? And her tears? And her kiss? Ungrateful wretch that he was! He had sought a home and not thought of the parrot who screamed out his name in her dear dwelling. There was a parrot like that in the world--and he wandered foolishly abroad. What madness! What baseness! He would go to her at once. But no! A merry thought struck him and a healing one. He took the key from the wall and put it into his pocket. He would go to her--at midnight. Chapter IX. He had definitely abandoned his club, the theatres were closed, the restaurants were deserted, his brother's family was in the country. It was not easy to pass the evening with that great resolve in his heart and that small key in his pocket. Until ten he drifted about under the foliage of the _Tiergarten_. He listened to the murmur of couples who thronged the dark benches, regarded those who were quietly walking in the alleys and found himself, presently, in that stream of humanity which is drawn irresistibly toward the brightly illuminated pleasure resorts. He was moved and happy at once. For the first time in years he felt himself to be a member of the family of man, a humbly serving brother in the commonweal of social purpose. His time of proud, individualistic morality was over: the ever-blessing institution of the family was about to gather him to its hospitable bosom. To be sure, his wonted scepticism was not utterly silenced. But he drove it away with a feeling of delighted comfort. He could have shouted a blessing to the married couples in search of air, he could have given a word of fatherly advice to the couples on the benches: "Children, commit no indiscretions--marry!"