The man had realized the promise of the boy; intoxication had torn away the mask of hypocrisy, and there was the stupid, dissolute face of the Halle student, whom Gotthold so well remembered. It could not be otherwise. But that this pitiful creature should be his father's successor, this blinking owl sit in the eyrie of the eagle, whose fiery eyes had always sought the sun; this coarse buffoon be permitted to tinkle his bells in the very place where the preacher, with glowing eloquence, had summoned his hearers to repentance and atonement, seemed to him a personal insult. And yet this man was in his proper place; the flock was worthy of the shepherd; everything here was of a piece--like a picture drawn by some master hand, in the boldest outlines and most glaring colors: the drunken Pastor nodding in the sofa corner, the excited, wine-flushed faces of the gamblers, the voluptuous figure of the maid-servant passing to and fro and handing the fiery beverage to the revellers, exchanging a sly smile or hasty word with one, coquettishly pushing away the hand of another, who tried to pass his arm around her waist--the true goddess of this temple of sin!--and the whole enveloped in the circling wreaths of gray smoke which ascended from the constantly burning pipes, and floated in dusky red rings around the dim wicks of the candles; only that it was no picture, but the coarsest, rudest, most commonplace reality. And alas, the outrage that she should be compelled to live under this roof, that the wild riot should re-echo even in her quiet room--not for the first or last time!-that these were the men who frequented the house--these empty-headed, silly young noblemen, this rough upstart, with his coarse hands and coarser jests. And when this company of fauns and satyrs departed, to have for her only consoler solitude--solitude which stared at her with cold, hard, piercing serpent eyes. There they were, those very eyes; they had just glanced over the cards with a quick stealthy look! Those eyes, and hers--soft, gentle, tender! Gotthold no longer saw the gamblers. He beheld her sitting in the lonely nursery beside her child's playthings; a touching figure, still so girlish in its soft, delicate outlines. He saw the sad face suffused with a roseate flush of joy, saw it disfigured with pain and terror-he lived over in imagination the whole scene, which already seemed like a dream; and dreamed on of a future which must surely come, a future full of sunlight, love, and poetry. He could not have told how long he had been sitting absorbed in thought, when a loud noise at the gaming-table suddenly startled him. Something unusual seemed to have happened; Hans Redebas and Brandow alone retained their seats, the others were bending over the table with eager faces; even Rieke was gazing so intently that she forgot to push away the Assessor's arm, which had been thrown around her waist. "Do you take it again?" cried Redebas. "Yes."