ant circumstances. Else had never ceased to be
completely enthralled by Robert. During her husband's life-time, she had
imagined that it was friendship, sisterly, almost maternal friendship.
When Herr von der Lehde died, she no longer had any motive for playing a
farce with her own conscience, and she told Robert plainly that she
expected him now to marry her. He was very much surprised and even
slightly amused. Thirty-three years old, at the zenith of his success,
living actually in the midst of a flickering blaze of ardent love, he had
the feeling that it was a very comical idea for a woman who was his
elder, with whom for a decade and a half he had lived on terms of wholly
unobjectionable friendship, and whom he had often unhesitatingly made the
confidante of his love-affairs, suddenly to wish him to marry her. To
return after the lapse of fifteen years to a dish which he had once
tasted with the eagerness of a greedy boy! This was not to be expected.
Love permits no Rip van Winkle adventures. It cannot be taken up where
it was interrupted a generation before. Its drama, whether it is to
close as comedy or tragedy, must be played without long intermissions in
a continuous performance to the end, in order not to become intolerably
tiresome and foolish.

Robert did not conceal this from Else, though he endeavoured to find
softening expressions. But oratorical caution does not deceive a woman
who is in love. Else was very unhappy over the rebuff. Her passion,
however, was stronger than her pride, and she humbled herself to
entreaties, persuasions, persistent pleading. Robert, to whom the
situation was becoming extremely uncomfortable, ceased to call upon the
irritated and excited woman and, as Mahomet showed himself unhesitatingly
ready to come to the mountain when the mountain did not come to Mahomet,
Robert refused to see his persecutor. For a time Frau von der Lehde was
filled with the most bitter resentment against the man who disdained her.
She had worked herself up into the idea that he owed her expiation, if
not before the world, surely before her own conscience, and it seemed to
her dishonourable that he should evade his duty. But her indignation did
not last. She could no longer live without Robert, and as he quietly
left her to sulk and did not make the slightest attempt to conciliate
her, after several sleepless nights she one day wrote a little note in
which she gently reproached him for so cul