hours Doctor Graesler was absent from his house, she was fond of conversing more frequently, and at all events more intimately, than the doctor found agreeable.
He tried, once, to call the attention of his sweetheart to the impropriety of such intercourse; but as Katharina seemed hardly to understand his scruples, he did not return to the matter, as he did not want the short period of happiness allotted him to be clouded by any kind of disagreement, and was, moreover, firmly resolved to regard this experience as nothing more than a pretty adventure which should not be prolonged by anything in the nature of a sequel. Therefore, whenever she began to ask him inquisitively, modestly, and apparently without special design, about his plans for the winter and to inquire after the climatic and social conditions of the island of Lanzarote, he would carry on the conversation as casually as possible and soon steer it into some other channel, so as, above all, not to allow her to nourish any kind of hopes which he was very definitely disinclined to fulfil. In the constant wish that no shadow might cross his enjoyment of this interlude, he also refrained from inquiring much about her past; he let the present suffice him, and was pleased not only at the happiness he was enjoying but even more at that which it was in his power to give.
And gradually, as the days and nights advanced, and espec1ally in the morning hours when Katharina lay sleeping by his side, the longing for Sabine began to stir within him more potently. He reflected how much happier he would be, how much more worthily his life would now be shaping itself, if instead of this pretty little shop-girl, who had certainly had several other lovers besides the bookkeeper to whom she had been engaged, and who was deceiving her good parents and gossiping with that neighbour of his—if instead of this rather insignificant creature, whose charm and goodheartedness he did not by any means underestimate, there were resting here, with her blond head on the pillow beside him, that remarkable creature who, so pure of soul, had offered herself to him as a life companion, and whom he had disdained because of an altogether unreasonable lack of self-confidence. For he could not deceive himself into denying that she had construed his foolishly timid letter as a definite rejection—which in the last analysis had really been his intention at that time. But could he, in his awkwardness and precipitancy, have done something which he could not undo? Was it
