ctoriously with the ODE TO JOY. And early one morning, Maurice held a
note in his hand, in which Louise announced that she had "come home,"
the night before.

She had been away for almost two months, and, to a certain extent, he
had grown inured to her absence. At the sight of her handwriting, he
had the sensation of being violently roused from sleep. Now he shrank
from the moment when he should see her again; for it seemed that not
only the present, but all his future depended on it.

Late in the evening, he returned from the visit, puzzled and depressed.

Seven had boomed from church-clocks far and near, before he reached the
BRUDERSTRASSE, but, nevertheless, he had been kept waiting in the
passage for a quarter of an hour: and he was in such an apprehensive
frame of mind that he took the delay as a bad omen.

When he crossed the threshold, Louise came towards him with one of
those swift movements which meant that she was in good spirits, and
confident of herself. She held out her hands, and smiled at him with
all her dark, mobile face, saying words that were as impulsive as her
gesture. Maurice was always vaguely chilled by her outbursts of
light-heartedness: they seemed to him strained and unreal, so
accustomed had he grown to the darker, less adaptable side of her
nature.

"You have come back?" he said, with her hand in his.

"Yes, I'm here--for the present, at least."

The last words caught in his ear, and buzzed there, making his
foreboding a certainty. On the spot, his courage failed him; and though
Louise continued to ring all the changes her voice was capable of, he
did not recover his spirits. It was not merely the sense of
strangeness, which inevitably attacked him after he had not seen her
for some time; on this occasion, it was more. Partly, it might be due
to the fact that she was dressed in a different way; her hair was done
high on her head, and she wore a light grey dress of modish cut and
design. Her face, too, had grown fuller; the hollows in her cheeks had
vanished; and her skin had that peculiar clear pallor that was
characteristic of it in health.

He was stupidly silent; he could not join in her careless vivacity.
Besides, throughout the visit, nothing was said that it was worth his
coming to hear.

But when she wished him good-bye, she said, with a strange smile:
"Altogether, I am very grateful to you, Maurice, for having made me go
away."

He himself no longer felt any satisfaction