The man proposed they should give up travelling entirely and return to Berlin a little earlier, but Kate would not listen to it. She had a secret dread of Berlin--oh, would she have to go back to her old life again? So far she had never asked herself what she had really expected from these long months of travel; but she had hoped for something--certainly. What? Oh dear, now she would be so much alone again, and there was nothing, nothing that really filled her life entirely. No, she was not able to return to Berlin yet. She told her husband that she felt she had not quite recovered yet--she was certainly anaemic, she was suffering from poorness of blood. She ought to have gone to Schwalbach, Franzensbad or some other iron springs long ago--who knows, perhaps many things would be different then. He was not impatient--at least he did not show it--for he was moved with a deep compassion for her. Of course she should go to some iron springs; they ought to have tried them long ago, have made a point of it. The Belgian doctor sent them to the well-known baths at Spa. They arrived there full of hope. In her the hope was quite genuine. "You will see," she said to her husband in a brighter voice, "this will do me good. I have a vague feeling--no, I really feel quite sure that something good will happen to us here." And he hoped so too. He forced himself to hope in order to please her. Oh, it would be enough, quite enough if the characteristics of the landscape won so much interest from her that she took up her painting again, which she had neglected entirely. How pleased he would be at even that. If her former zeal for art showed itself again, that was a thousand times more health-bringing than the strongest iron springs at Spa. The heather was in bloom, the whole plateau was red, the purple sun set in a mass of purple. It happened as he had hoped, that is to say, she did not begin to paint, but she made expeditions into the Ardennes and the Eifel with him on foot and in a carriage, and enjoyed them. The Venn had bewitched her. In her light-coloured dress she stood like a small speck of light in the immense seriousness of the landscape, protected her eyes with her hand from the view of the sun, which is so open there, so unobstructed either by tree or mountain, and took deep breaths of the sharp clear air that has not yet been vitiated by any smoke from human dwellings, hardly by human breath. Around her the Venn blossomed like a carpet of one colour, dark, calm, refreshing and beneficial to the eye; it was only here and there that the blue gentian and the white quivering flock of the cotton-grass were seen to raise their heads among the heather.