You must remember that Little Johannes was no longer so _very_ little. Nearly four years had passed since that morning when he had waked up in the dunes, with the little gold key. He could not refrain from reading the poem to the countess on the following day. The making of it--the writing and rewriting--had calmed the unrest out of which it had come. He was curious, now, to learn what others would say of it--above all, the one who was ever in his thoughts. "Ah, yes!" said she, after he had read it aloud, "life is fearful! And that 'surcease' is all that I long for. I fully agree with you." This remark, however kind the intention of the speaker, gave Johannes, to his own astonishment, small pleasure. He would have preferred to hear something different. "Do you think it good?" he asked, with a vague feeling that he really ought not to ask the question, because he had been so very much in earnest over the verses. And when one is deeply in earnest about anything one does not ask if it is good; no more than he would ask if he had wept beautifully. But yet he would have liked, so well, to know what she thought. "I do not know, Johannes. You must not hope for a criticism from me. I think the idea very sympathetic, and the form seems to me also quite poetic. But whether or not it is good poetry, you must ask of Mijnheer van Lieverlee. He is a poet." "Is Mijnheer van Lieverlee coming soon?" "Yes; I expect him shortly." One fine day Van Lieverlee put in an appearance. With him arrived a host of merrily creaking, yellow trunks, smelling delightfully like russia leather--ditto high-hat box, and a brisk, smooth-shaven, traveling-servant. Van Lieverlee wore in his button-hole a dark-red rose, and pointed pale-green carnation leaves. He was very much at his ease--contented and gay--and when he saw Johannes he did not appear to have a very clear remembrance of him. That evening Johannes read to him the poem. Van Lieverlee listened, with an absent-minded expression of face, while he drummed on the arm of the low, easy-chair in which he lay indolently outstretched. It looked very much as if the verses bored him. When it was over, and Johannes was waiting in painful suspense, he shook his head emphatically.