with a heart torn with regret
and forbidden love; though that flourishing exterior of his doesn't
quite seem to suit that theory either. What does the aunt, of the
stomach drops, say to it all?'

"'She is highly satisfied,' said Alexander. 'But oh! if you have any
real commiseration for me, if you don't want to embitter for ever this
occasion of our meeting again after all this time, do, for Heaven's
sake, leave off your damnable questions, and begin your stories.'

"They saw that Alexander was so terribly in earnest, that it would be
cruelty to keep him on tenter-hooks any longer. So Marzell at once
began his part of the tale, as follows:

"'We all admit and know that, this day two years ago, a very pretty
girl turned all our heads at the first glance; that we conducted
ourselves as young asses do in such circumstances, and couldn't shake
off the insanity which had come upon us. Night and day, wherever I
went, that girl's image haunted me. She went with me to the War Office,
into the Secretary of State's private sanctum; she came to meet me out
of his writing-table, and confused all my finely turned official
periods with her beautiful eyes, so that people asked me, with
melancholy faces, if the old wound in my head was troubling me again.
To see her again was my goal, the object of all my restless efforts. 1
ran from one street to another like a letter-carrier, from morning till
night. I looked up at all the well-to-do people's windows, all in vain.
Every afternoon I used to come to the Webersche Zelt here.'

"So did I! So did I!' cried Severin and Alexander.

"'I used to see you,' said Marzell, 'but I kept carefully out of your
way.'

"That's exactly what we did, too,' they all cried _in tutti_.' Oh, what
infernal donkeys!'

"'It was no use,' said Marzell. 'But I had neither peace nor rest. The
very idea that she was in love with somebody else already, that I could
but perish in hopeless misery, even if ever I succeeded in making her
acquaintance; that I should only then clearly find out the extent of my
misery, to wit, her inconsolable regret for the man she had lost, her
love for him, and her fidelity--I say, just this very idea was what
fanned the fire within me to a terrific pitch of fury. The tragic
pictures of her condition which Severin painted here for us came back
to my mind, and, while I piled up all imaginable love-misfortunes on to
her head, I seemed to myself to be the more unfortunate of the two