people who would think themselves very well off to marry me
if they got the chance. So, adieu.'

"With which she went rustling out.

"'She means the book-keeper,' thought Traugott. As he was calm, now, he
betook himself to Herr Roos, to whom he demonstrated circumstantially
that there could not possibly be any further question of him as a
son-in-law, or as a partner either. Herr Elias agreed to everything,
and asseverated, times without number, in the office, with gladness of
heart, that he thanked God he was well rid of the crack-brained
Traugott, when the latter was far away from Dantzic.

"Life dawned upon Traugott with a fresh and glorious brightness when he
found himself in the longed-for land. The German artists in Rome
admitted him into the circle of their studies, and thus it happened
that he made a longer stay there than his eagerness to see Felizitas,
which had urged him on restlessly till then, wholly justified. But this
longing had become less urgent. It had taken more the form of a
blissful dream whose perfumed shimmer pervaded all his being, so that
he looked upon it, and the exercise of his art, as matters belonging
wholly to the high and holy, super-earthly realm of blissful presage
and anticipation. Every female figure which he painted with his skilful
artist's hand had the face of the beautiful Felizitas. The young
artists were much struck by the beauty of this face, of which they
could not come across the original in Rome; and they besieged Traugott
with questions as to where he had seen her. But he felt a certain
shyness about telling them his strange adventure at Dantzic; till at
length an old friend of his, Matuszewski by name (who, like himself,
had devoted himself to painting in Rome), joyfully announced that he
had seen the girl whom Traugott introduced in all his pictures.
Traugott's joy may be imagined; he no longer made any secret of what it
was that had drawn him so strongly to art and brought him to Italy, and
the artists thought his Dantzic adventure so curious and interesting
that they all undertook to search eagerly for his lost love.
Matuszewski was the most successful; he soon found out where the girl
lived, and learnt, besides, that she really was the daughter of a poor
old painter, who was at that time tinting the walls in the church of
Trinita dell' Monte. Traugott went to that church with Matuszewski, and
thought he actually recognized old Berklinger in the painter, who was
up u