She passed her days as on a swaying bough in momentary expectation of being blown into the depths. Then again her life seemed to her like a straight, bare road, which gave no signs of coming to an end, but ever unrolled hopeless stretches ahead. Always the same pleasures, the same faces, the same aimless drifting from place to place until dawn. Sometimes she felt so weary--as if after a day's hard labour. Sometimes, too, she went on strike, and remained in bed reading the _Fliegende Blätter_, or dreaming of old times with closed eyes. Mrs. Asmussen's sunless hole among the books became a paradise, her mush, food for the gods. Lilly's thoughts stepped cautiously about the pictures of her girlhood loves, as if it were a crime to charm them back into being. From this arose a happy, yet fearful presentiment that one or the other of them would return, and hold out his hand, and say: "Now you have strayed in strange lands long enough. Come back home." Which of them it was she did not venture to say. But one of them it must be. Something, something _must_ happen. It could _not_ go on the same way. Now and then, when her secret disquiet filled her with unrest, she took again to her nocturnal strolls. In the electric tram she would ride to distant districts, where, with a guilty soul, she sauntered along lively streets. Just like Mrs. Jula. Yet she could never bring herself to listen to any of her pursuers. * * * * * It was on one such excursion in May far out on the north side, somewhere near the Rosentaler Tor, that she met a young man who paid not the slightest attention to her, who did not look like a gentleman, and yet seemed familiar. So familiar that her heart pained her. She racked her brain, but could not place him. Making up her mind quickly she turned about and followed him. He wore a brown, sweat-soaked hat and a salt and pepper suit with a yellow tinge to it, which had seen better days. His coat collar was shiny, and his knees had worked great bags into his trousers, the bottom of which hung in black fringes over his crooked heels. None of her friends in disguise. Her friends wore different trousers. He stopped in front of various display windows--a cigar shop, a butcher's, and, longest of all, a haberdasher's. From which Lilly concluded his undergarments also required a change. When he turned his profile toward her, she saw a lean, bony face with a prominent nose and a bush of reddish-brown hair on either side of his chin. He did not appear to be sickly; rather seedy or withered. But the lids of his small, slit-like eyes were swollen and inflamed, and before he stepped into the garish illumination of the shop window, he planted dark-blue goggles on his nose.