“_Unsinn!_” There was scorn in his voice. All levity immediately fled from him. “The world has taken me too literally. Alas! When I was in earnest they thought I was jesting and when I jested they failed to grasp my humor—the French are the only people who understand me. When I meant to be a Socrates they mistook me for an Aristophanes and when I played Aristophanes they charged me with trying to be a Socrates. I a profligate! He who has lived the life of a profligate often writes virtuous tracts. It is your priest, your morality-preaching Philistine, your man wrapped in the pure white robe of piety, who is often the real profligate. My life has been given to devotion—I have been a Carmelite, locked in the cell of my dreams. I was a little Ishmael in the wilderness of Beer Sheba dying of thirst. Ah! that consuming thirst, the thirst of beauty that sears one’s soul—thirsting, thirsting—thirsting to the end! I have always loved honorably, earnestly, with all the senses God meant for love. Ah, love! There is nothing else in life worth striving after. What else is there in life? Fame, riches, achievements?—they are only coal burnt to clinkers. If I only had a child on whom to lavish my love in my dying days!——” A sigh, almost a groan, escaped his parted lips. “Let me take the place of a child,” she pleaded in a whisper, tears filling her eyes. “Indeed you are my _allersüsstes Kind_.” He was fondling her fingers tenderly. “The fates have been kind to me after all to send you to me now, my good fairy.” Dusk came, the invisible shades of twilight were thickening. With his eyes sealed he felt the approach of night. “Will you come tomorrow, my child?” “I’ll come every tomorrow.” “Until there will be no tomorrow—” He caught his breath as he completed her thought. VI. The candle was burning fast; the wick was charred; the wax was all but melted; the dying flame leaping upward from the depth of the overheated sconce. Darkness, and yet again the candle flame shot up. No one knew better than Albert that his life was spent, that the fire within him was licking the last vestige of life-grease, that he was emitting the last flicker. He did not wish to crepitate and flutter at the end. Let a tongue of red flame be the last memory of the extinguished light. Save for the Butterfly and his faithful physician, Albert was quite forsaken in his last days. But rarely did visitors drop in and now and then a distant admirer—usually a woman of high rank—from Germany, from England, from Russia, came to pay homage to his genius. His sister had come and gone, but his good mother was obliged to stay away. The poor woman was too old to make the journey. Besides, she was wondering why her son, being the younger, did not make the trip to Hamburg. For he had succeeded in keeping up the pious deception that he was only troubled with his eyes and could therefore not write to her with his own hand.