figure, in spite of its youth and
strength, seemed to him pathetic. Taking up his knapsack, he went out.

The smoke of cottages rose straight; wisps of mist were wandering about
the valley, and the songs of birds dropping like blessings. All over the
grass the spiders had spun a sea of threads that bent and quivered to
the pressure of the air, like fairy tight-ropes.

All that day he tramped.

Blacksmiths, tall stout men with knotted muscles, sleepy eyes, and great
fair beards, came out of their forges to stretch and wipe their brows,
and stare at him.

Teams of white oxen, waiting to be harnessed, lashed their tails against
their flanks, moving their heads slowly from side to side in the heat.
Old women at chalet doors blinked and knitted.

The white houses, with gaping caves of storage under the roofs, the red
church spire, the clinking of hammers in the forges, the slow stamping
of oxen-all spoke of sleepy toil, without ideas or ambition. Harz knew
it all too well; like the earth's odour, it belonged to him, as Sarelli
had said.

Towards sunset coming to a copse of larches, he sat down to rest. It was
very still, but for the tinkle of cowbells, and, from somewhere in the
distance, the sound of dropping logs.

Two barefooted little boys came from the wood, marching earnestly along,
and looking at Harz as if he were a monster. Once past him, they began
to run.

'At their age,' he thought, 'I should have done the same.' A hundred
memories rushed into his mind.

He looked down at the village straggling below--white houses with
russet tiles and crowns of smoke, vineyards where the young leaves were
beginning to unfold, the red-capped spire, a thread of bubbling stream,
an old stone cross. He had been fourteen years struggling up from all
this; and now just as he had breathing space, and the time to give
himself wholly to his work--this weakness was upon him! Better, a
thousand times, to give her up!

In a house or two lights began to wink; the scent of wood smoke reached
him, the distant chimes of bells, the burring of a stream.

IX

Next day his one thought was to get back to work. He arrived at the
studio in the afternoon, and, laying in provisions, barricaded the lower
door. For three days he did not go out; on the fourth day he went to
Villa Rubein....

Schloss Runkelstein--grey, blind, strengthless--still keeps the valley.
The windows which once, like eyes, watched men and horses creeping
thro