s; and both young men got on well with her, in the
usual superficial way. For Maurice Guest, she had the additional
attraction, that he had once seen her in the street with the object of
his romantic fancy.

Since the afternoon when he had heard from Madeleine Wade who this was,
he had not advanced a step nearer making her acquaintance; though a
couple of weeks had passed, though he now knew two people who knew her,
and though his satisfaction at learning her name had immediately
yielded to a hunger for more. And now, hardly a day went by, on which
he did not see her. His infatuation had made him keen of scent; by
following her, with due precaution, he had found out for himself in the
BRUDERSTRASSE, the roomy old house she lived in; had found out how she
came and went. He knew her associates, knew the streets she preferred,
the hour of day at which she was to be met at the Conservatorium. Far
away, at the other end of one of the quiet streets that lay wide and
sunny about the Gewandhaus, when, to other eyes she was a mere speck in
the distance, he learned to recognise her--if only by the speed at
which his heart beat--and he even gave chase to imaginary resemblances.
Once he remained sitting in a tramway far beyond his destination,
because he traced, in one of the passengers, a curious likeness to her,
in long, wavy eyebrows that were highest in the middle of the forehead.

Thus the pale face with the heavy eyes haunted him by day and by night.

He was very happy and very unhappy, by turns--never at rest. If he
imagined she had looked observantly at him as she passed, he was elated
for hours after. If she did not seem to notice him, it was brought home
to him anew that he was nothing to her; and once, when he had gazed too
boldly, instead of turning away his eyes, as she went close by him to
Schwarz's room, and she had resented the look with cold surprise, he
felt as culpable as if he had insulted her. He atoned for his
behaviour, the next time they met, by assuming his very humblest air;
once, too, he deliberately threw himself in her way, for the mere
pleasure of standing aside with the emphatic deference of a slave.
Throughout this period, and particularly after an occasion such as the
last, his self-consciousness was so peculiarly intensified that his
surroundings ceased to exist for him--they two were the gigantic
figures on a shadow background--and what he sometimes could not believe
was, that such feelings as t