"I rather think Helfen has been a friend to me," said Courvoisier,
smiling.

"Have you found lodgings already?"

"Yes."

"So!" said his interlocutor, rather puzzled with the new arrival. I
remember the scene well. Half a dozen of the men were standing in one
corner of the room, smoking, drinking beer, and laughing over some not
very brilliant joke; we three were a little apart. Courvoisier, stately
and imposing-looking, and with that fine manner of his, politely
answering his interrogator, a small, sharp-featured man, who looked up
to him and rattled complacently away, while I sat upon the table among
the fiddle-cases and beer-glasses, my foot on a chair, my chin in
my hand, feeling my cheeks glow, and a strange sense of dizziness
and weakness all over me, a lightness in my head which I could not
understand. It had quite escaped me that I had neither eaten nor drunk
since my breakfast at eight o'clock, on a cup of coffee and dry
_Broedchen_, and it was now twelve hours later.

The pause was not a long one, and we returned to our places. But
"Tannhauser" is not a short opera. As time went on my sensations of
illness and faintness increased. During the second pause I remained in
my place. Courvoisier presently came and sat beside me.

"I'm afraid you feel ill," said he.

I denied it. But though I struggled on to the end, yet at last a deadly
faintness overcame me. As the curtain went down amid the applause,
everything reeled around me. I heard the bustle of the others--of the
audience going away. I myself could not move.

"_Was ist denn mit ihm?_" I heard Courvoisier say as he stooped over me.

"Is that Friedhelm Helfen?" asked Karl Linders, surveying me. "_Potz
blitz!_ he looks like a corpse! he's been at his old tricks again,
starving himself. I expect he has touched nothing the whole day."

"Let's get him out and give him some brandy," said Courvoisier. "Lend
him an arm, and I'll give him one on this side."

Together they hauled me down to the retiring-room.

"_Ei!_ he wants a schnapps, or something of the kind," said Karl, who
seemed to think the whole affair an excellent joke. "Look here, _alter
Narr!_" he added; "you've been going without anything to eat, _nicht_?"

"I believe I have," I assented, feebly. "But I'm all right; I'll go
home."

Rejecting Karl's pressing entreaties to join him at supper at his
favorite Wirthschaft, we went home, purchasing our supper on the way.
Courvoisier's first step