Late the following evening, Falkenberg was pacing up and down the space jutting out from the Hofgarten towards the river, and known as the Schöne Aussicht. (Schöne Aussicht—Belle Vue—Bella Vista: why have we no name for it in England, we who have so much of the thing itself?) It was the very hour which Sara had mentioned as being her favourite one for strolling about. Had Falkenberg had any idea of meeting her there? Hardly. He was scarcely the man to go with such a purpose, especially in the case of Sara Ford. He had come, partly because he wished to be alone, and partly because she had said she loved the place. So much he confessed to himself; nor did it disturb him in that he knew it was a dream that he cherished. He was thinking about her now as he paced about, thinking of what she had said about loving to watch the river, the Rhine. Falkenberg watched it too, as it flowed majestically along, eleven hundred feet across, from one low flat bank to the other, making a low, sedate music as he seemed to march by, with his grand, broad, unintermittent sweep, having gathered in might and volume during his long journey past castle and crag and town, between the walls of Mainz and beneath the frowning escarpments of Ehrenbreitstein, between rock and vineyard and village and hamlet, until he came to proud Cologne, the fairest gem in his crown, and then, broader and stronger and older and greyer, went sweeping on past the other villages and towns, towards Rotterdam and Holland and the sea. Rudolf saw not another human creature. He ceased his walk, and placed himself on one of the benches looking towards the river, and, leaning his elbow on the back of it, smoked, and abstractedly watched a great American Rhine steamer, with _Kaiser Wilhelm_ inscribed on her paddle-box, which was steaming slowly into the harbour to stay there and be repaired before the next tourist season began. The lights on her poop and deck cast bright rays athwart the sullen grey of the stream, but he did not see them though he was looking at them. ‘I wish she was not engaged to this fellow,’ he thought. ‘It’s young Wellfield, I suppose, unless I was very much deceived by what I saw at Trockenau that night. I may do him injustice, but I have an idea that when all comes to the point, he will look first to his precious self. It is not surprising if he is both vain and selfish, after the ordeal he has gone through of flattery and gratuitous love affairs and desperate cases, and girls who have made fools of themselves about him. But it is a pity that at last a noble woman should have fallen a victim. God forgive me if I do the lad injustice. I hope I do. One can but wait the event.’ He knocked the ash from his cigar, and gazed across the river at the outline, now very dim, of a battered-looking tree on the opposite shore.