ee, Friedel. What will he do when he finds out what
a common clay figure it was he worshiped?"

But he had not the heart to banter the child; only held the little
clinging figure to his breast; the breast which Sigmund recognized as
his heaven.

It was after this that Eugen said to me when we were alone:

"It must come before he thinks less of me than he does now, Friedel."

To these speeches I could never make any answer, and he always had the
same singular smile--the same paleness about the lips and unnatural
light in the eyes when he spoke so.

He had accomplished one great feat in those three years--he had won over
to himself his comrades, and that without, so to speak, actively laying
himself out to do so. He had struck us all as something so very
different from the rest of us, that, on his arrival and for some time
afterward, there lingered some idea that he must be opposed to us. But I
very soon, and the rest by gradual degrees, got to recognize that though
in, not of us, yet he was no natural enemy of ours; if he made no
advances, he never avoided or repulsed any, but on the very contrary,
seemed surprised and pleased that any one should take an interest in
him. We soon found that he was extremely modest as to his own merits and
eager to acknowledge those of other people.

"And," said Karl Linders once, twirling his mustache, and smiling in the
consciousness that his own outward presentment was not to be called
repulsive, "he can't help his looks; no fellow can."

At the time of which I speak, his popularity was much greater than he
knew, or would have believed if he had been told of it.

Only between him and von Francius there remained a constant gulf and a
continual coldness. Von Francius never stepped aside to make friends;
Eugen most certainly never went out of his way to ingratiate himself
with von Francius. Courvoisier had been appointed contrary to the wish
of von Francius, which perhaps caused the latter to regard him a little
coldly--even more coldly than was usual with him, and he was never
enthusiastic about any one or anything, while to Eugen there was
absolutely nothing in von Francius which attracted him, save the
magnificent power of his musical talent--a power which was as calm and
cold as himself.

Max von Francius was a man about whom there were various opinions,
expressed and unexpressed; he was a person who never spoke of himself,
and who contrived to live a life more isolated and a