Robinetta! Was he still longing? The more he learned, the less he longed--because that feeling, also, was dissected, and Pluizer explained to him what love really was. Then he was ashamed, and Doctor Cijfer said that he could not yet reduce it to figures, but that very soon he would be able to. And thus it grew darker and darker about Little Johannes. He had a faint feeling of gratitude that he had not recognized Robinetta on his awful journey with Pluizer. When he spoke of it, Pluizer said nothing, but laughed slyly; and Johannes knew that he had not been spared this out of pity. When Johannes was neither learning nor working, Pluizer made use of the hours in showing him the people. He took him everywhere; into the hospitals where lay the sick--long rows of pale, wasted faces, with dull or suffering expressions. In those great wards a frightful silence reigned, broken only by coughs and groans. And Pluizer pointed out to him those who never again would leave those halls. And when, at a fixed hour, streams of people poured into the place to visit their sick relations, Pluizer said: "Look! These all know that they too will sometime enter this gloomy house, to be borne away from it in a black box." "How can they ever be cheerful?" thought Johannes. And Pluizer took him to a tiny upper room, pervaded with a melancholy twilight, where the distant tones of a piano in a neighboring house came, dreamily and ceaselessly. There, among the other patients, Pluizer showed him one who was staring in a stupid way at a narrow sunbeam that slowly crept along the wall. "Already he has lain there seven long years," said Pluizer. "He was a sailor, and has seen the palms of India, the blue seas of Japan, and the forests of Brazil. During all the long days of those seven long years he has amused himself with that little sunbeam and the piano-playing. He cannot ever go away, and may still be here for seven more years." After this, Johannes' most dreadful dream was of waking in that little room--in the melancholy twilight--with those far-away sounds, and nothing ever more to see than the waning and waxing light.