ate in the evening
that most of the variously shaped boats, with coloured lanterns at
their bows, were returning when they started.

Louise herself had proposed it. When he went to her that afternoon, he
found her stretched on the sofa. A theatre-ticket lay on the table--for
she had taken him at his word, and shown him that she could do without
him. But to-night she had no fancy for the theatre: it was too hot. She
looked very slight and young in her white dress; but was moody and out
of spirits.

On the way to Connewitz, they spoke no more than was necessary. Coming
back, however, they had the river to themselves; and she no longer
needed to steer. He placed cushions for her at the bottom of the boat;
and there she lay, with her hands clasped under her neck, watching the
starry strip of sky, which followed them, between the tops of the trees
above, like a complement of the river below.

The solitude was unbroken; they might have gone down in the murky
water, and no one would ever know how it had happened: a snag caught
unawares; a clumsy movement in the light boat; half a minute, and all
would be over.--Or, for the first and the last time in his life, he
would take her in his arms, hold her to him, feel her cheek on his; he
would kiss her, with kisses that were at once an initiation and a
farewell; then, covering her eyes with his hands, he would gently, very
gently, tilt the boat. A moment's hesitation; it sought to right
itself; rocked violently, and overturned: and beneath it, locked in
each other's arms, they found a common grave....

In fancy, he saw it all. Meanwhile, he rowed on, with long, leisurely
strokes; and the lapping of the water round the oars was the only sound
to be heard.

At home, on the lid of his piano, lay the prospectuses of music-schools
in other towns. They were still arriving, in answer to the impulsive
letters he had written off, the night after the theatre. But the last
to come had remained unopened.--He was well aware of it: his lingering
on had all the appearance of a weak reluctance to face the inevitable.
For he could never make mortal understand what he had come through, in
the course of the past week. He could no more put into words the
isolated spasms of ecstasy he had experienced--when nothing under the
sun seemed impossible--than he could describe the slough of misery and
uncertainty, which, on occasion, he had been forced to wade through.
For the most part, he believed that