glance. "I shall fight against it, against that dread of
mine.... Do you believe in presentiments?"

"Yes, inversely: mine always turn out the opposite!"

"Then I hope that my presentiment won't come true either."

"But what is it?"

"That within the year ... one of us ... at Lipara ... will be dead."

Herman stared at him fixedly. For all his manliness and his muscular
strength, there lay deep down within him a certain heritage of the
superstition that comes murmuring from the sea as with voices of distant
prophecy, a superstition lulled by the beautiful legends of their
Gothlandic sea, which, syren-like, sings strange, mystic fairy-tales.
Perhaps he had never until this moment felt that some of it flowed in
his rich blood; and he tried to shake it off as nonsense:

"But Othomar, do be rational!" he said.

"I can do nothing to prevent it, Herman. I don't think about it, but I
feel little sharp stings, like thoughts suddenly springing up. And
lately ... oh, lately, it has been worse; it has become a dream, a
nightmare! I was walking through the shopping-streets of Lipara and from
all the shops came black people and they measured out bales of black
crape, with yard-measures, till the streets were filled with it and the
crape lay in the town as though in clouds and surged over the town like
a mass of black muslin. It made everything dark: the sun could not shine
through it and everything lay in shadow. The people did not seem to
recognize me and, when I asked what all that crape was for, they
whispered in my ears, 'Hush, hush, it's ... it's for the Imperial!' ...
O Herman, then I woke and I was damp with perspiration and it was as
though I still heard it echoing after me: 'For the Imperial, it's for
the Imperial!'"

Herman got up; he was a little nervous:

"Come," said he, "shall we go?... Dreams: don't pay any attention to
dreams, Othomar!"

Othomar also rose:

"No, I oughtn't to pay attention to them," he repeated, in a strange
tone. "I never used to."

"Othomar," Herman began, decidedly, as though he wished to say
something.

"Don't talk to me for a minute; let me be for a moment," Othomar
interrupted, quickly, anxiously.

They walked through the woods in silence. Othomar looked about him,
strangely, looked at the ground. Herman compressed his lips tightly and
puckered up his forehead: he was annoyed. But he said nothing. In a few
minutes Othomar's strange glances grew calmer and quieted down into
t