around me, collected them from every age and period. They were hiding in the jars, in the old books, in the old charts. I have some belonging to the fourteenth century. They used to hide in the family-papers. The first moment I saw them, they rose up, the poor souls . . . with all their sins upon them, all their past. They are suffering . . . they are in purgatory. They chained themselves on to me, because they know that I shall be kind to them . . . and now they refuse to leave me. I drag them with me wherever I go, wherever I stand, wherever I sit. Their chains pull at my body. They hurt me sometimes, but they can't help it. . . . Last night . . . last night, the room was so full of souls that there was a cloud of them all round me; and I was suffocating. I wanted to go out, but the landlady and her brother prevented me. They are a miserable pair: they would have let me die of suffocation. They are a pair of brutes too: they tread on the poor souls. Do you hear . . . on the stairs? Do you hear their feet? They are treading on the souls. . . ."
Paul's face was white; and he said, nervously trying to change the subject:
"Have you seen Dorine this morning, Ernst?"
Ernst looked at his brother suspiciously:
"No," he said, "I have not seen her."
"She was here, wasn't she?"
"No, I haven't seen her," he said, suspiciously;
