ce come face to face with him.
Next, she looked round her for some common friend, and found that he
had not an intimate left in all Leipzig. She wrote again, still more
plainly, and again he ignored her letter.

One Saturday afternoon, she was walking along the crowded streets of
the inner town. She had been to the MOTETTE, in the THOMASKIRCHE, and
was now on her way home, carrying music from the library. The snow had
melted to mud, and sleet was falling. Madeleine had no umbrella; the
collar of her cloak was turned up round her ears, and her small felt
hat covered her head like an extinguisher.

On entering the PETERSTRASSE, she was jostled together with Dove. It
was impossible to beat a retreat.

Dove seldom hurried. On this day, as on any other, he walked with a
somewhat pompous emphasis through slush and stinging rain, holding his
umbrella straight aloft over him, as he might have carried a banner. He
was shocked to find Madeleine without one, at once took her under his,
and loaded himself with her music--all with that air of
matter-of-course-ness, which invariably made her keen to decline his
aid. Dove was radiant; he prospered as do only the happy few; and his
satisfaction with himself, and with the world in general, was somehow
expressed even through the medium of his long neck and gently sloping
shoulders. He greeted Madeleine with an exaggerated pleasure,
accompanying his words by the slow smile which sometimes set her
wondering if he were not, perhaps, being inwardly satirical at the
expense of other people, fooling them by means of his own foolishness.
But, however this might be, the cynical feelings that took her in his
presence, mounted once more; she knew his symptoms, and an excess of
content was just as distasteful to her as gluttony, or wine-bibbing, or
any other self-indulgence.

However, she checked the desire to snub him--to snub until she had
succeeded in raising that impossible ire, which, she believed, MUST
lurk somewhere in Dove--for, as she plodded along at his side,
sheltered from the brunt of the weather, it occurred to her that here
was some one whom she might tap on the subject of Maurice. She opened
fire by congratulating her companion on his recent performance in an
ABENDUNTERHALTUNG; at the time, even she had been forced to admit it a
creditable piece of work. Dove, who privately considered it
epochmaking, was outwardly very modest. He could not refrain from
letting fall that the old