hem out word by word. That night, till the sky
grew gray in the east, he sat there turning the pages of the dictionary
with wet eyes and glowing face, and selecting definitions by the test of
the heart. He found that some of these letters he had never before taken
the pains to read through. In the bitterness of his indignation, he
cursed the fool who had thrown away a love so loyal and priceless.

All this time he had been thinking of Ida as if dead, so far off in
another world did those days seem. It was with extraordinary effect that
the idea finally flashed upon him that she was probably alive, and now
in the prime of her beauty. After a period of feverish and impassioned
excitement, he wrote a letter full of wild regret and beseeching, and
an ineffable tenderness. Then he waited. After a long time it came back
from the German dead-letter office. There was no person of the name at
the address. She had left Bonn, then. Hastily setting his affairs in
order, he sailed for Germany on the next steamer.

The incidents of the voyage were a blank in his mind. On reaching Bonn,
he went straight from the station to the old house in ------strasse.
As he turned into it from the scarcely less familiar streets leading
thither, and noted each accustomed landmark, he seemed to have just
returned to tea from an afternoon lecture at the university. In every
feature of the street some memory lurked, and, as he passed, threw
out delaying tendrils, clutching at his heart. Rudely he broke away,
hastening on to that house near the end of the street, in each of whose
quaint windows fancy framed the longed-for face. She was not there,
he knew, but for a while he stood on the other side of the street,
unmindful of the stares and jostling of the passers-by, gazing at the
house-front, and letting himself imagine from moment to moment that her
figure might flit across some window, or issue from the door, basket
in hand, for the evening marketing, on which journey he had so often
accompanied her. At length, crossing the street, he inquired for the
Werner family. The present tenants had never heard the name. Perhaps the
tenants from whom they had received the house might be better informed.
Where were they? They had moved to Cologne. He next went to the Bonn
police-office, and from the records kept there, in which pretty much
everything about every citizen is set down, ascertained that several
years previous Herr Werner had died of apoplexy, and t