"'Better go in and comfort the intended,' he said, going back to the office. Christina went to her own room, just to put on some other 'things;' give out the week's washing; make the necessary arrangements with the cook about the Sunday dinner, and hear the gossip of the town during that process, and then go at once and see what was the matter with the 'intended.' "Yon know, dear reader, that we should all of us--had we been in Traugott's place--have had to go through the essential stages of the condition. No escape from that. After the despair comes a benumbed, heavy brooding, in which the 'crisis' takes place; and then the condition passes into a gentle sorrow, in which Nature knows how to apply her remedies efficaciously. "In this stage of heavy, but beneficent sorrow, Traugott was sitting some days afterwards on the Karlsberg, gazing once more at the waves as they beat upon the shore, and the grey mists that lay over Hela. But not, this time, was he trying to read the future. All that he had hoped and anticipated was past. "'Ah!' he sighed, 'my calling for art was a bitter deception. Felizitas was the phantom which lured me to believe in what never existed save in the insane dreams of a fever-sick fool. It is all over. I fight no more! Back to my prison! So let it be, and have done with it!' "Traugott worked in the office again, and the marriage-day with Christina was fixed once more. The day before it, Traugott was standing in the Artus Hof, looking, not without inward heart-breaking sorrow, at the fateful forms of the burgomaster and his page, when he noticed the broker to whom Berklinger had been trying to sell his paper. Almost involuntarily, without thinking what he was doing, he went up to him and asked him: "'Did you know a strange old man with a black, curly beard, who used to come here some time ago, with a handsome lad?' "'Of course I did,' said the broker: Godfried Berklinger, the mad painter.' "'Then have you any idea what's become of him?--where he's living now?' "'Certainly I have,' answered the broker; 'he's been quietly settled down at Sorrento for a good while, with his daughter?' "'With his daughter Felizitas?' cried Traugott, so vehemently that all the people looked round at him. "'Well, yes,' answered the broker quietly; 'that was the nice-looking lad that used to go about with the old man. Half Dantzic knew it was a girl, though the old gentleman thought nobody would ever find it out. It had been prophesied to him that if his daughter ever got into any love-affair he would die a horrible death, and that was why he didn't want anybody to know about her, and gave out that she was his son.' "Traugott stood as if petrified. Then he set off running through the streets, out at the town-gate to the open country, and on into the woods, loudly lamenting.