"Why," said Oswald to himself, while he was walking towards the town-gate, "why are you not a pedant among pedants, since fate does not permit you to be a Roman among Romans? Why do you kick against the pricks to which all the cattle patiently submit? You might be as well off as the others. After all, it may not be so bad a thing to sit, as Berger used to call it, in the easy-chair of an office; the night-cap of a sinecure may protect one against many an attack of rheumatism--the effect of a draught in this windy outside world; and he who has a virtuous wife lives twice as long; and when he is compelled to die, like everybody else, they play and sing from the steeple, that the whole town hears it and prays for the peace of his soul." Above him it rustled in the tall trees with which the street was lined that led to the suburb and to Miss Bear's boarding-school. The evening breeze has torn the dense veil of fog, and the crescent of the increasing moon was dancing through the clouds in their spectral flight. A horseman galloped past him towards town. The horse snorted; sparks flew. A moment later, and the noise was scarcely audible, and soon ceased altogether. "Somebody, I dare say, who rides for the doctor; a husband, perhaps, whose wife is taken ill; a father, whose son is lying on his death-bed." Oswald thought of the night when Bruno died, and of his fearful ride across the heath from Grenwitz to Fashwitz. If Bruno had only lived! Oswald thought everything would have happened differently then. It seemed to him as if the death of the boy alone had made him so miserably poor--as if he could have challenged a world in arms, with him by his side. With him and good fortune! no sacrifice would have been too great for Bruno's sake; not even the sacrifice of his love for Helen. He would have willingly and cheerfully given the fair girl to Bruno--but to him alone, in the world. Given? What had he to give--he the beggar? Now he was standing before the house he had come to see, and supported himself against the iron railing of the garden. There was not a window lighted up in the whole house. The inmates had probably all retired to rest. He thought of the summer nights when he had stood looking by the hour at the open window with the curtains lowered, from which the music of a piano was wafted to him through the soft, silent air; and hours afterwards, long after the light had vanished behind the red curtains and the music had ceased, and he had still wandered up and down between the flower-beds and under the tall beech-trees, sometimes till the first purple streak of morning-dawn appeared on the eastern horizon, and the birds in the thick bushes began dreamily to twitter above him. A breath of wind rushed through the two tall poplar-trees on both sides of the lofty portal and whispered mysteriously in the dry leaves, a window-shutter flapped in the house, a dog in a neighboring house began to bark.