Even then, in the crisis of this ridiculous occurrence, Edmund had fallen deeply in love, though he was scarcely aware of it himself. And it was only a painful sense of his own stupidity that prevented him from going to search for her all over the town. He could not think of her otherwise than with a great red lump on her forehead, and the bitterest reproach, the most distinct expression of anger, in her face and in her whole being. There was not the faintest trace of this, however, about her as he saw her now. She blushed indeed over and over again when she saw him, and seemed unable to control herself. But when her father asked him his name, &c., she said with a delightful smile, and in gentle accents, "that she must be much mistaken if he were not Mr. Lehsen, the celebrated painter, whose works she so immensely admired." Those words, we need not say, ran through Edmund's nerves like an electric shock. In his emotion he was about to burst into flowers of rhetoric, but the Commissionsrath would not let him get to that, clasping him to his breast with fervour, and saying, "My dear sir, what about the cigar you promised me?" And whilst he was lighting said cigar at the ashes of the former one, he said, "So you are a painter? and a great one, from what my daughter Albertine tells me--and she knows what she is talking about in such matters, I can assure you. I'm very glad you are. I love pictures, and, as my daughter Albertine says, 'Art' altogether, most tremendously. I simply dote upon it. And I know something about it, too. I'm a first-rate judge of a picture. My daughter Albertine and I know what we're about there. We've got eyes in our heads. Tell me, my dear painter, tell me without hesitation, wasn't it you who painted those pictures which I stop and look at every day as I pass them, because I cannot help standing to admire the colouring of them? Oh, it is beautiful!" Edmund did not quite understand how the Commissionsrath managed to see any pictures of his daily in passing them, seeing that he had never painted any signboards, that he could remember. But after a good deal of questioning, it turned out that Melchior Bosswinkel meant certain lacquered tea-trays, stove-shades, and things of that sort, which he saw and much admired in a shop-window as he went to business of a morning, after two or three sardines and a glass of Dantziger at the Sala Tarone. These productions constituted his highest ideal of the pictorial art. This disgusted the painter not a little; and he cursed, internally, Bosswinkel and his wretched chatter, which was preventing him from making any approach to the young lady. At last there came up an acquaintance, who engaged him in conversation, and Edmund took advantage of this to go and sit down beside Albertine, who seemed to be very much pleased at his doing so.