He heard Amy's soft laugh and turned round. His look encountered that of Oskar, who seemed to be trying to catch his eye over Amy's blonde head. He felt irritated by that look and deliberately avoided it and struck a few chords again in a melancholy ballad-style. He felt a desire to describe all that had happened to him to-day, and looked at the clock over the door. It was past one. He caught Heinrich's eye and they both got up. Oskar pointed to Amy, who had gone to sleep on his shoulder, and intimated by a smile and a shrug of his shoulders that under such circumstances he could not think of going for the present. The two others shook hands with him, whispered good-night and slipped away. "Do you know what I've done?" said Heinrich. "While you were improvising so extraordinarily finely on that ghastly piano I tried to get the real hang of that libretto that I spoke to you about in the spring." "Oh, the opera libretto! that _is_ interesting. Won't you tell me?" Heinrich shook his head. "I should like to, but the unfortunate thing is, as you've already seen, that it's really not yet finished--like most of my other so-called plots." George looked at him interrogatively. "You had a whole lot of things on hand last spring, when we saw each other last." "Yes, I have made a lot of notes, but to-day I've done nothing more than sentences ... no words, no, just letters on white paper. It's just as if a dead hand had touched everything. I'm frightened the next time I tackle the thing that it will all fall to pieces like tinder. Yes, I've been going through a bad time, and who knows if there's a better one in store for me?" George was silent. Then he suddenly remembered the notice in the papers which he had read somewhere or other about Heinrich's father, the former deputy, Doctor Bermann. He suspected that that might be the reason. "Your father is ill, isn't he?" he asked. Heinrich answered without looking at him. "Yes, my father has been in a mental home since June." George shook his head sympathetically. Heinrich continued: "Yes, it's an awful business, even though I wasn't on very intimate terms with him during the last months it is indescribably awful, and goes on being so." "I can quite understand," said George, "not making any headway with one's work under circumstances like that." "Yes," answered Heinrich hesitatingly. "But it's not that alone. To be quite frank that business plays a comparatively subordinate part in my present mental condition. I don't want to make myself out better than I am. Better...! Should I be better...!" He gave a short laugh and then went on speaking. "Look here, yesterday I still thought that it was the accumulation of every possible misfortune that depressed me so. But to-day I've had an infallible proof that things of no importance at all, positively silly things in fact, affect me more deeply than very real things like my father's illness. Disgusting, isn't it?"