protégée as Mignon was making her first public appearance. The same evening he saw and heard Kläre, who sang Philine in the same scene. He was then twenty-five years old, unattached, and godless. He simply forgot about Mignon, obtained an introduction through Frau Natalie Eisenstein to Philine, and declared to her that his heart, his influence, and his position were at her service. At that time Kläre was living with her mother, the widow of a higher postal official; and she was in love with a young medical student with whom she frequently drank tea and chatted in his room in the Alservorstadt. She was deaf to the Baron's stormy courtship, but with her disposition softened by Leisenbohg's attentions she became the mistress of the student. The Baron, to whom she made no secret of this fact, returned to his auburn protégée, but kept up his acquaintanceship with Kläre. On every holiday that furnished the slightest opportunity he sent her flowers and bon-bons, and he would pay an occasional formal call at the house of the postal official's widow.
In the fall Kläre took up her first engagement in Detmold. The Baron von Leisenbohg—at that time still an official in the ministry—used his first Christmas holidays to visit Kläre at her new place of residence. He knew that the student had become a doctor and had married in September, and he took hope. But Kläre, upright as ever, informed the Baron immediately after their meeting that in the meanwhile she had entered on tender relations with the tenor of the Hoftheater, with the result that Leisenbohg could take away no other memories of Detmold than a platonic stroll through the city park and a supper in the theatre restaurant in company with several colleagues of both sexes. Nevertheless he repeated his trip to Detmold several times, rejoiced in his aesthetic concern for Kläre's considerable progress, and, further, hoped for the next season, for which the tenor was already contracted in Hamburg. But this year he was again disappointed, since Kläre had felt herself obliged to grant the petitions of a wholesale merchant of Dutch descent, by the name of Louis Verhajen.
When, in her third season, Kläre was called to a place in the Dresden Hoftheater, in spite of his youth the Baron threw over a very promising political career and moved to Dresden. Now he spent each evening with Kläre and her mother, who had acquired a
