He did not hear. With his long stork-like steps he hurried on to the platform. His breast heaved, and the veins started out in knots on his wide arched temples. He stood there with his clenched fist pressed to his left side, and stared with frightened eyes at the incoming train. "Uli!" cried a resonant voice in jubilation echoing along the platform, and a blond head was thrust out of one of the carriage windows. Beneath the yellow hair were cheeks tanned to copper hue, a pair of merrily twinkling eyes, and a long flowing beard which the draught from the train swept backwards like a besom. Frau von Stolt caught hold of her husband's arm. "He has not improved in looks," said she. "Grown rather wild," he assented. Four eye-glasses were directed with breathless attention to the two friends as they flew into each other's embrace. "It was wise of him, after all, to wait till the grass had grown over that affair," went on Frau Malwine. But Herr von Stolt, as sceptical well-wisher, reserved his opinion. He let his eye-glass fall, made a grimace, and merely muttered-- "Unsavoury story; unsavoury story!" Then, apparently radiant with joy, he hurried forward to shake the hand of the home-coming neighbour. II Cool twilight reigned in the back parlour of the Prussian Crown. The outside shutters were closed, and only one small chink let in the now lessened heat of the sun shining through the green boughs of the limes without, and streaming across the floor in a bar of subdued gold. In this room for generations any one who was anybody in Münsterberg society, or who, through professional service, had any claim on it at all, had been in the habit of meeting. Besides wealthy landowners and the officers of the Münsterberg cavalry, the justice of the peace, a couple of doctors, and two or three magistrates assembled there nearly every evening for convivial intercourse. It also served as a convenient rendezvous for the wives of the country gentry when they came into the town for shopping, and in the holidays it was the place chosen by their sons wherein to celebrate their "Kneips." On these occasions the door was kept locked and adorned with a placard bearing the words "Closed for cleaning"--a precautionary measure to ensure the rising generation against parental intrusion. It was here on familiar ground, in the room which had once witnessed the feats in champagne-drinking of "Quartaner" Sellenthin, that the reunited friends came to rest and refresh themselves. While Ulrich Kletzingk, white and exhausted from heat, reclined in the corner of a sofa, his long legs outstretched, the returned traveller, wildly happy, paced up and down between the tables, breathing in greedily the old scent, that he knew so well, of mingled tobacco, leather, and beer.