ch we had, and still the letter lay unopened. And when breakfast
was over he even took up his violin and played runs and shakes and
scales--and the air of a drinking song, which sounded grotesque in
contrast with the surroundings. This lasted for some time, and yet the
letter was not opened. It seemed as if he could not open it. I knew that
it was with a desperate effort that he at last took it up, and--went
into his room and shut the door.

I was reading--that is, I had a book in my hands, and was stretched out
in the full luxury of an unexpected holiday upon the couch; but I could
no more have read under the new influence, could no more have helped
watching Sigmund, than I could help breathing and feeling.

He, Sigmund, stood still for a moment, looking at the closed door;
gazing at it as if he expected it to open, and a loved hand to beckon
him within. But it remained pitilessly shut, and the little boy had to
accommodate himself as well as he could to a new phase in his mental
history--the being excluded--left out in the cold. After making an
impulsive step toward the door he turned, plunged his hands into his
pockets as if to keep them from attacking the handle of that closed
door, and walking to the window, gazed out, silent and motionless. I
watched; I was compelled to watch. He was listening with every faculty,
every fiber, for the least noise, the faintest movement from the room
from which he was shut out. I did not dare to speak to him. I was very
miserable myself; and a sense of coming loss and disaster was driven
firmly into my mind and fixed there--a heavy prevision of inevitable
sorrow and pain overhung my mind. I turned to my book and tried to read.
It was one of the most delightful of romances that I held--no other than
"Die Kinder der Welt"--and the scene was that in which Edwin and
Toinette make that delightful, irregular Sunday excursion to the
Charlottenburg, but I understood none of it. With that pathetic little
real figure taking up so much of my consciousness, and every moment more
insistently so, I could think of nothing else.

Dead silence from the room within; utter and entire silence, which
lasted so long that my misery grew acute, and still that little figure,
which was now growing terrible to me, neither spoke nor stirred. I do
not know how long by the clock we remained in these relative positions;
by my feelings it was a week; by those of Sigmund, I doubt not, a
hundred years. But he turn