a pleasant walk,"' but Max backed away
behind the stove, declining to commit himself to an unknown tongue.
Mark took a last look at her laughing gaily there in the lamplight.
Would he ever hear her laugh like that again? How would he ever find
courage to tell her? There was little need just then of Holroyd's
prohibition.

He went down to the hotel steps to the little open space where the two
streets unite, and where the oil lamp suspended above by cords dropped
a shadow like a huge spider on the pale patch of lighted ground below.
The night was warm and rather dark; no one was about at that hour; the
only sound was the gurgle of the fountain in the corner, where the
water-jets gleamed out of the blackness like rods of twisted crystal.
He entered the narrow street, or rather alley, leading to the bridge.
In the state of blank misery he was in his eye seized upon the
smallest objects as if to distract his mind, and he observed--as he
might not have done had he been happy--that in the lighted upper room
of the corner house they had trained growing ivy along the low
raftered ceiling.

So, too, as he went on he noticed details in each dim small-paned
shop-front he passed. The tobacconist's big wooden negro, sitting with
bundles of Hamburg cigars in his lap and filling up the whole of the
window; the two rows of dangling silver watches at the watchmaker's;
the butcher's unglazed slab, with its strong iron bars, behind which
one small and solitary joint was caged like something dangerous to
society; even the grotesque forms in which the jugs and vases at the
china shop were shadowed on the opposite wall.

He looked up at a quaint metal inn-sign, an ancient ship, which swung
from a wrought-iron bracket overhead. 'When next I pass under that!'
he thought.

He came to the end of the street at last, when his way to the place of
meeting lay straight on, but he turned to his right instead, past the
_Zoll-Verein_--where the chief was busy writing by the window under
his linen-shaded oil-lamp--and on to the bridge as if some
irresistible attraction were drawing him.

When he reached the recess opposite to that in which Mabel had met
Vincent he stopped mechanically and looked around; the towns were
perfectly still, save for the prolonged organ note of the falls, which
soon ceases to strike the ear. On either bank the houses gleamed pale
under a low sky, where the greenish moonlight struggled through a rack
of angry black clouds.