The storm had long subsided and the night was far advanced when Gotthold, treading softly and carefully, shielding his light with his hand, crossed the wide garretlike entry, lumbered with all sorts of articles, towards the gable-room, which had been assigned him as his sleeping apartment. Brandow, with whom he had been sitting until this time over a bottle of wine in the room on the right-hand side of the entry, which had always been appropriated by the master of the house, had wished to accompany him, but Gotthold declined: he could find the way; two pairs of boots made more noise than one, and he remembered that footsteps on the upper floor sounded remarkably loud at night. "Well then, go alone, you stickler for everybody's comfort," said Brandow laughing, "and remember, sleep off all thoughts of going away to-morrow; I tell you once for all I won't hear of it. I'll stop for Jochen Prebrow as I pass the smithy to-morrow; he can sit on the box with my Fritz, and I'll bring your luggage out to you. I shan't let you leave under a week, and if I had my way you should stay here always. But you'll take good care not to do that; such a life would be unendurable to a man of the world. Well, I have complained of my fate more than is seemly; but in the presence of a man of your stamp, one is too painfully reminded of what he might perhaps have made himself, and what he has finally become. Good night, old fellow, and pleasant dreams!" And now Gotthold stood at the open window in the cosy old gable-room. But eagerly as he inhaled the night breeze, which blew fresh and cool through the trees, still dripping with rain-drops, it did not lighten his heart, which throbbed heavily and painfully in his panting breast, like a sleeper whose brain is oppressed by some painful dream. Was it not all a mad dream that he was standing in Dollan in the gable-room, gazing at the dim light which fell upon the dark shrubbery from the window below him, the window of the room where she had slept when a girl, and in which she now watched beside the bed of her child, her child and his-- Gotthold sank into a chair beside the window, and pressed his hands upon his burning brow.