gs;' give out the week's washing; make the necessary arrangements
with the cook about the Sunday dinner, and hear the gossip of the town
during that process, and then go at once and see what was the matter
with the 'intended.'

"Yon know, dear reader, that we should all of us--had we been in
Traugott's place--have had to go through the essential stages of the
condition. No escape from that. After the despair comes a benumbed,
heavy brooding, in which the 'crisis' takes place; and then the
condition passes into a gentle sorrow, in which Nature knows how to
apply her remedies efficaciously.

"In this stage of heavy, but beneficent sorrow, Traugott was sitting
some days afterwards on the Karlsberg, gazing once more at the waves as
they beat upon the shore, and the grey mists that lay over Hela. But
not, this time, was he trying to read the future. All that he had hoped
and anticipated was past.

"'Ah!' he sighed, 'my calling for art was a bitter deception. Felizitas
was the phantom which lured me to believe in what never existed save in
the insane dreams of a fever-sick fool. It is all over. I fight no
more! Back to my prison! So let it be, and have done with it!'

"Traugott worked in the office again, and the marriage-day with
Christina was fixed once more. The day before it, Traugott was standing
in the Artus Hof, looking, not without inward heart-breaking sorrow, at
the fateful forms of the burgomaster and his page, when he noticed the
broker to whom Berklinger had been trying to sell his paper. Almost
involuntarily, without thinking what he was doing, he went up to him
and asked him:

"'Did you know a strange old man with a black, curly beard, who used to
come here some time ago, with a handsome lad?'

"'Of course I did,' said the broker: Godfried Berklinger, the mad
painter.'

"'Then have you any idea what's become of him?--where he's living now?'

"'Certainly I have,' answered the broker; 'he's been quietly settled
down at Sorrento for a good while, with his daughter?'

"'With his daughter Felizitas?' cried Traugott, so vehemently that all
the people looked round at him.

"'Well, yes,' answered the broker quietly; 'that was the nice-looking
lad that used to go about with the old man. Half Dantzic knew it was a
girl, though the old gentleman thought nobody would ever find it out.
It had been prophesied to him that if his daughter ever got into any
love-affair he would die a horrible death, and that was why