her with all the passion of his stricken soul to be silent and to keep him hidden, even if he were to fall ill, to tell no one but to keep him there and be silent. Why he had asked that, why it had seemed so necessary to him that the girl should say nothing--even now he didn’t understand that. But he felt just the same this minute, and he would be utterly devoted to Christian all his life if he, too, would never betray what he had just confessed to him. “Will you? Will you?” he asked, solemnly, and with a dark glow in his tormented eyes. “I shall keep silent,” Christian replied. “Then perhaps I can go on living,” the boy said. Christian looked at him, and their eyes met in a strange harmony and understanding. “And how long did you stay with the girl after that?” Christian asked. “I don’t know. But one morning she said she couldn’t keep me any longer and I’d have to go. All the previous time my consciousness hadn’t been clear. I must have talked as in delirium. The girl did all she could for me; my condition went to her heart. She sat at the bedside for hours and held my hands. After I left her I wandered about in the suburbs and in the woods, I don’t know where. At last I came here. I don’t know why I came to you, except that it seemed as though Ruth were sending me to you. You seemed to be the only human being that existed for me in all the world. But what am I to do now? What is going to happen?” Christian reflected for several seconds before he answered with a strange smile: “We must wait for him.” “For him? For whom?” “For him.” And again their eyes met. It was late at night, but they did not think of sleeping. XV In addition to the room which his mother gave him, Niels Heinrich had another lodging at a tinsmith’s in Rheinsberger Street on the fourth floor. On the day after his conversation with Christian he moved away from there. He did it because too many people knew that he lodged here. Also he couldn’t sleep there any more. He slept half an hour, at most; then he lay awake smoking cigarettes, tossing from side to side. From time to time he laughed a dry, rattling laugh, whenever the recollection of something which that man Wahnschaffe had said became particularly vivid. Who was that man, anyhow? You could think till your brain cracked. That man! Curiosity was like a conflagration in Niels Heinrich. He took a room in Demminer Street with a grocer named Kahle. The room was immediately over the shop. The big sign saying “Eggs, Butter, Cheese” almost covered the low window; consequently there was little light in that hole. In addition the flooring and the walls were so thin that one could hear the ringing of the shop bell, the talk of the customers, and all other sounds. There he lay again and smoked cigarettes and thought of that man. That man and he--there was no place in the world for them both. That was the upshot of his reflections.