George, who was leaning up against a wooden pillar of the verandah, turned to Frau Golowski with that studious politeness which he always ostentatiously assumed when talking to her. "Won't you ask Fräulein Therese in both our names if she wouldn't care to stay out here for a day or two? The top room is quite at her service. I'm on the point of going into the mountains for a short time, you know," he added, as though he regularly slept in the little room at all other times. Frau Golowski expressed her thanks. She would tell Therese. George looked at his watch and saw that it was time to start for home. He and Heinrich then said good-bye. Anna accompanied both of them as far as the garden door, remained standing a little while and watched them till they got on to the height where the Sommerhaidenweg began. The little village at the bottom of the valley flowed past them in the moonlight. The hills loomed pale like thin walls. The forest breathed darkness. In the distance thousands of lights glittered out of the night mist of the summer town. Heinrich and George walked by each other in silence and a sense of estrangement arose between them. George remembered that walk in the Prater in the previous autumn, when their first almost confidential talk had brought them near to each other. How many talks had they not had since? But had they not all, as it were, gone into thin air? And to-day, too, George was unable to walk through the night with Heinrich without exchanging a word, as he used to do many a time with Guido or with Labinski without feeling any loss of real sympathy. The silence became a strain. He began to talk of old Stauber, as that was the first subject to occur to him, and praised his reliability and versatility. Heinrich was not very taken with him and thought him somewhat intoxicated with the sense of his own kindness, wisdom and excellence. That was another kind of Jew which he could not stand--the self-complacent kind. The conversation then turned on young Stauber, whose vacillation between politics and science had something extremely attractive about it for Heinrich. From that they turned into a conversation about the composition of parliament, about the squabbles between the Germans and the Tschechs and the attacks of the Clericals on the Minister of Education. They talked with that strained assiduousness with which one is accustomed to talk about things which are absolutely indifferent to one in one's heart of hearts. Finally they discussed the question whether the Minister ought to remain in office or not after the dubious figure he had cut over the civil marriage question, and had the vaguest ideas after they had finished as to which of them had been in favour of his resignation and which of them against it. They walked along the churchyard. Crosses and gravestones towered over the walls and floated in the moonlight. The path inclined downwards to the main road. They both hurried so as