* * * * * Then she found herself once more alone in the Augustinerstrasse. You were always, when you were old, finding yourself alone like that. She went on, suddenly forlorn to desperation. The sun had long since disappeared behind some leaden clouds hanging over the Capuchin Church, the rain was coldly falling and the streets were getting slippery again. The warmth in her veins was gone, the color departed from her face. Those unpleasant, sick shivers were passing thickly up and down her back, and that point of pain stuck between her shoulders. She pressed her umbrella, needing a stitch at one of the points, the cloth had slipped quite far up--when it happened she couldn't think--close down about her head. The damp, hurrying crowds were jostling her unbearably, carelessly poking their umbrellas into hers. She finally turned in at one of the less frequented streets to get back to the Hoher Markt, a little longer, but out of the relentless pressure of the crowd. She kept thinking about Pauli's hand over Corinne's, on the table; the crumpled paper napkins, the few tiny bread crumbs, the wine glasses with their deep, red lees, Pauli's dark hand with the gold and turquoise ring over the slim, unringed whiteness of Corinne's.... She wanted suddenly there in the cold streets to weep for Corinne, for Pauli. She was conscious of some faint, wordless prayer that went up out of her weakness, just frightened supplication rather than thinking, and "Oh, my little, _little_ Inny!"... Then her eyes were caught and held by the fatal, antique symbol of ultimate, entire misery that was inescapably presenting itself. There, creeping along the walls of the houses, under their eaves, was a very tall, pale, heavy-eyed woman with a child in her arms covered by an end of her tattered, colorless shawl. She was soon, very soon, perhaps that very night, to bring another into that wintry world. At her skirts dragged a rachitic little boy of four or five.... Das Elend.... Misery. Suddenly Frau Stacher's heart grew so big, so big with a desolate pity that she thought it would burst the thin walls of her aching chest. It was indeed the symbol, the living, cruel symbol of the misery of that wintry, starving city. It was all caught up into that wretched group, to which so soon that other, unwanted and unwanting, would be added, that child still safe in the womb.... She caught her breath stickingly, sharply.