CHAPTER X. While this interview between Melitta and Oldenburg was taking place at the Kurhaus, and, as by the blow of a charmed wand, the barriers fell which had seemed to be destined to part two good hearts forever, there had been sitting in the room on the right hand--which "was occupied by a traveller who would surely not stay beyond the next morning"--this very traveller quite near the door which led from one room to the other, supporting his feverish head with his hands, and suffering in his lacerated heart unspeakable anguish. Oswald had returned, on his way from the asylum, along the river, almost as in a dream; for when he left Berger at the gate of the institution, the parting with him and the last terrible words of the unfortunate man had quite overwhelmed him, and kept him from every effort of thinking calmly. His brains and his heart were a perfect chaos, filled with all that he had heard and seen since his arrival in Fichtenau on the preceding evening--with all the impressions which he had so suddenly received, all the thoughts that had been stirred up, all the passions that had been unchained. He had a dim presentiment that such a state of mind must in the end lead to insanity, if it were not already itself a kind of insanity. Ought he not to turn back and knock at the gate behind which Berger had disappeared? Was not that house, with its high prison-walls, the best refuge for hearts that were as weary of the world as his was? Or still better, ought he not to throw himself over the railing into the river below, where it rushed, deep and silent, between the steep, high banks, gliding noiselessly along like a serpent? Would he not be sure thus to cool his heated brow forever, and to silence the hammering pulsations in his temples for all eternity? How could he hope ever to find an issue into rosy light from a labyrinth in which so noble, so lofty a mind as Berger's had lost its way irretrievably? Was not Berger far superior to him in strength of mind, as well as in nobility of soul? And yet, and yet--"that I may fully measure the depth of this wretchedness, that I may touch with my own hands the incredible," the poor man had said, when he fell into the arms of the rope-dancer. Was that, then, the last conclusion of wisdom? The high-minded idealist saw himself excelled by the rude slave of sensuality in courage of life and joyousness of life! The pupil of Plato acknowledged a drunken clown as his master! The man who, like the youth of Saïs, had striven all his life only after truth, fraternized with a coarse story-teller, a charlatan, who defied all rules, of probability even, and lived merrily and cheerfully on the credulity of others, as the swallow lives on midges. As old Lear in the tempestuous night on the heath tears the royal mantle from his shoulders, so as to have no advantage over poor Tom, the "poor bare-backed animal, whose belly cries for two red