On the following day, Styr, who had never been more gracious, asked him if he would walk with her in the park next morning at four of the clock. For a moment he felt so blank that his mouth stood ajar; but not only had he grown accustomed to fall in with her plans, but he had an immediate vision of himself and the heroine of his romantic friendship alone in the vast solitudes of the Englischergarten, and assented with enthusiasm. Margarethe, when not out of temper (when he, too, could be very sulky and obstinate), never failed to carry him whither she listed; but this mere tantalizing of the natural romance of youth was to breed results of which Styr, far-sighted as she commonly was, had no presentiment.

He went to bed at nine o’clock, an event that had not occurred within his memory. On the following morning at three he fumbled into his clothes under the impression that he was a somnambulist, and wished between prodigious yawns that Frau von Tann had chosen to explore the mysteries of the Englischergarten by moonlight. But when his gloomy servant, who had been ordered to rouse him, brought him a cup of strong coffee, his wits quickened. Further encouraged by the waiting droschke, in whose appearance he had placed little faith, he repaired to the Schwabing bridge in the proper frame of mind to meet a dark-browed woman muffled in a long white cloak and with a white veil floating about her head.

She led him with shining eyes past the lake with its sleeping swans, past the sweetly smelling fields, through silences as of untrodden mountain tops. The stars were crowding one another out of the deep cold blue of the sky; from the earth rose strange subtle perfumes which made him blush for his decadent Roman love of artificial scents; the shadows were dark on the open reaches; distant trees stood out black and sharp; the woods seemed huddled together; even the Isar crawled silently in its sleep.

Suddenly Styr flung out her hands, the palms upturned to the flickering sky. She looked like a priestess about to chant her p?an to the gods. Off the stage she had never appealed so directly to that artistic and sensuous side of his nature he had assiduously cultivated, and he gazed at her, stirred by a formless but eager sense of expectation which he did not comprehend until long after. He did not even attempt to formulate the wish that she were a goddess and himself a god, and that they had floated to a plane where no sound stirred but the music of Wagner; but as she turned her head and her eyes met his, she looked so young, and at the same time so different from all women, that involuntarily he moved a step forward.

“Oh!” she cried. “Do you know that this is the very first time in my life that I have known—lived—romance? Romance! The mere word is wonderful. During all the years of my youth I did not even believe in its existence. To think that once I was sixteen—twenty—twenty-eight—the ideal age—and that I never once glanced over the wall into the lovely mysterious gardens of other women’s youth! It is incredible that I never at least dreamed of—anticipated it.”

“But if it has come—what matter?”

“No, it does not matter. But oh, poor poets! poor psychologists! That I can drink this full cup of romance without finding the commonplace dregs of love at the bottom! All the other senses and appreciations are intensified, instead of being submerged, as when one is surrendering ignominiously to the race. I feel that I have attained heights that other women, silly victims that most of them are, have not even the power to imagine. My hands are in the secret caskets of life, and all the jewels are mine! mine!”

She looked so triumphant, so wholly beautiful, so like Isolde, that the colour mounted to his face, although she frightened him a little, and he wished he were ten years older. But she never gave him time to feel that he was not rising to the occasion (although this agonizing sensation visited him occasionally in the retrospect), any more than she ever permitted an electrified moment to prolong itself until it had kindled fire. She came down to earth abruptly.

“Let us walk faster. I want to walk in the woods, and if we loiter we shall take cold.”

But as they entered those dim glades which might have been the depths of remote forests, he asked abruptly, “Am I your lover?”

“Yes—in a new fashion!” She spoke gayly. “It is a sort of mental marriage. Are you content?” She looked at him with the humorous flash in her eyes which always lit up the breach between their ages.

“I think it is rather odd that I am, you know. I must be as cold as a fish—or else that woman I told you about so put me off—”

“Well, don’t put your good fortune under a microscope. Be grateful that when you do awaken you will have preserved the freshness of youth to give zest and charm to the energy of maturity.”

“Suppose I never do awaken.”

“You will. For long I wondered why you had so many of the qualifications as well as something of the temperament of genius, without any one of the creative gifts. But I have come to the conclusion that you have a very rare gift—that of the supreme lover.”

“I?”

“It will wake up in due course, that genius of yours—oh, yes.”

“And why not for you?” He was still conscious of no desire to touch her, but what man could resist flirtation in such surroundings?

“Because neither of us wishes it. We have a perfect thing. Why shatter it? When you cross that dark threshold, you never know! If I were fifteen years younger and of your own world—”

“You would not be you. I don’t know—I have a feeling—a presentiment—that one day I shall love you. I sometimes have a vision of myself ten years older living with you in Venice.” He spoke with sudden energy. “I am certain it will come to pass.”

“Venice smells so dreadfully. I had no idea you were given to romantic musings.”

“I am not. It is, as I said, a sort of fleeting vision, a presentiment. I know that you will always be in my life; and naturally I see you where one can command the greatest seclusion. I do not picture myself wholly your lover, but I always see you quite alone with me—when I am older, and, somehow, different.”

“Well, remember that I too shall be older,” she replied with mock sadness. “By that time, no doubt, Wagner will have ground my voice to powder, and I shall be playing Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, or introducing Ibsen to London and New York.”

She had succeeded in diverting him. “Ah! you would go to America—you intend to go there some ............