"The idiot child loves me," he said to himself, "her frog's eyes receive a gleam of intellect when she looks at me! And then she crouches behind the sloe hedge, treated in as step-motherly a manner as that unhappy fruit which would gladly be a plum, but which tarries for ever in sour immaturity. Nothing is more touching than these half-human beings, with their distorted souls! An evidence of the poverty of Creation's plan! It may be vast and grand upon the whole, but it can value the human mind but little which it can thus embitter! Certainly it often seems as if the comprehension of the world and of life creeps with astounding suddenness into the twilight of such minds." On the following day, a rainy one, which drew a melancholy grey net over the whole sky, Blanden sat lost in thought beneath the eaves of the forest house; he was stroking the bull-dog which had placed itself at his feet, listening contentedly to the monotonous plashing from the water pipes, while it only reminded Blanden of the everlasting sameness of human life, and a sensation of as infinite weariness overcame him, at the regular fall of the drops, as he should have felt at the tick-tack of an old clock on a wall. All measurement of time oppressed him; life at such moments only appeared to him to be a nervous struggle to avoid hearing the beats marking its flight, the pulse-like throb of the seconds, the chiming of the hours, and like a clock's hands passing away over the thin and thick lines, over that empty scheme of time, whose laws we are to carry out, well or ill, often when our heart's blood is being shed. He thought of Paulina, of Eva--and when he wished to forget the inevitable, other cares of life arose to his mind; he had been without news from Kulmitten for some time, and the election to the Provincial Diet must have taken place within the last few days; perhaps his participation in public life could console him for the miscarriage of the hopes of his heart. He was awoke out of these dreams by the noise of an approaching carriage; in the woodland solitude of the forest house, the arrival of visitors was quite an event. Two men sat in the conveyance; the one in a dripping mackintosh was his friend von Wegen; in the other, who on descending lifted a ponderous chest with care out of the carriage and deposited it immediately in safety beneath the verandah, he recognised the strange amber merchant. Wegen shook himself like a dog coming out of the water. "Desperate weather! Heaven opens its sluices--a perfect deluge; the roads abominable--one longs to make the Landrath drive upon them from morning to night. If they are thus already in summer, one ought to make one's will in winter before trusting oneself to these causeways of logs." "You are heartily welcome," cried Blanden to his friend, and shaking him by the hand. "What brings you hither in this tropical downpour of rain?"