ding-place. Wilhelm stepped on board, and remained on deck, staring
absently into the fog or at the dim outlines of the houses on the
shore. On the night of his escape from the Boulevard Pereire he had
driven to the Gare du Nord, and taken a midnight train, which brought
him at about six the next evening to Cologne. He was dead with fatigue
when he got there, stayed the night, and went on the following
afternoon to Hamburg. He had been there two days now, but had not been
able till to-day to gather sufficient courage to go and see Paul.
Solitude had been an absolute necessity to him; he fancied that he who
ran might read upon his brow the story of how he had lived and of what
he had been guilty. His thoughts were incessantly in Paris. During the
journey, in Cologne, since his arrival in Hamburg, he saw nothing but
Pilar's room, her return from the ball, and her passionate exhibition
of grief during the hours and days that followed. He only lived in
these imaginings. There seemed as yet no immediate connection between
his natural surroundings and his mental life. He felt as if a few steps
would bring him again to Pilar's side, and more than once the desire
came over him to return to her, and lay himself at her feet, there to
vegetate luxuriously henceforth, without a will or thought, to the end.
He resisted this impulse, but he was powerless against the tyranny of
his imagination, which ceased not to call up before him the scenes that
were being enacted in the house in Paris.

After a minute or two the boat started. The shores receded and spread
apart, and the lines of houses came and went like dissolving views upon
a white wall. The boat shot under the dark and clammy arch of the
bridge, where the echo increased the splashing of the steamer waves and
the thump of the machinery to a roar. The noise subsided suddenly, as
when a damper is laid over a resounding instrument; the steamer had
passed the bridge, and floated out on to the broad waters of the Aussen
Alster, which widened apparently into a great bay, the mist having
wiped out the boundary lines between its oily surface and the flat
shores which barely rose above it. The boat described bold curves from
side to side, touching at the different landing-places, and
presently--dimly at first and then more distinctly--the square tower
and ponderous, castle-like structure of the Fahrhaus Hotel came in
sight. The steamer had reached the furthest point of its journey.

Wil