as though he wanted to go thoroughly to the dogs. Did Heinrich still find the matter so tragi-comic? Frau Ehrenberg had grown quite white with grief. And Else had cried her eyes out in front of George one morning in the grounds; but had she only been crying about Oskar? The grey in front of the compartment window slowly cleared. George watched the telegraph wires outside sweeping and shifting across each other with swift movements and he thought of how, yesterday afternoon, his own lying words to Anna had travelled across one of these wires: "Shall be with you early to-morrow morning. Fondest love, your own George."... He had hurried back straight from the post-office to an ardent and desperate final hour with the other woman, and he could not realise that even at this very minute, when he had already been away from her for a whole eternity, she should still be lying asleep and dreaming in that same room with the fast-closed windows. And she will be home this evening with her husband and children. Home--just as he would be. He knew that it was so and he could not understand it. For the first time in his life he had been near doing something which people would probably have had to call madness. Only one word from her ... and he would have gone out with her into the world, have left everything behind, friends, mistress and his unborn child. And was he not still ready to do so? If she called him would he not go? And if he did do so would he not be right? Was he not far more cut out for adventures of that kind than for the quiet life full of responsibilities which he had chosen for himself? Was it not rather his real line to career boldly and unhesitatingly about the world than to be stuck somewhere or other with his wife and child, with all the bothers about bread-and-butter, his career and at the best a little fame? In the days from which he had just come he had felt that he was living, perhaps for the first time. Each moment had been so rich and so full, and not only those spent in her arms. He had suddenly grown young again. The country had flowered with a greater splendour, the arc of the sky had grown wider, the air which he drank had exhaled a finer spice and strength, and melodies had rippled within him as never before. Had he ever composed anything better than that wordless song to be sung on the water with its sprightly rocking melody? And that fantasy had risen strangely by the shore of the lake one hour out of depths of his which he had never dreamt of, after he had seen the wondrous woman for the first time. Well, Herr Hofrat Wilt would no longer have occasion to regard him as a dilettante. But why did he think of him of all people? Did the others know what kind of a man he was any better? Didn't it often seem to him as though even Heinrich, who had once wanted to write an opera libretto for him, had failed to judge him any more accurately? And he heard again the words which the