sed!--Those two!--Like in blood is like
in kind;--such people attract each other as the lodestone tends towards
the iron and the iron towards the lodestone!"

But these and similar admonitions had produced little effect on the
physician's sentiments; even Paula's repulse of his ardent appeal after
she had moved to the house of Rufinus had failed to extinguish his
hope of winning her at last. This very morning, in the course of the
discussion as to the stewardship of her fortune, Paula had been
ready and glad to accept him as her Kyrios--her legal protector and
representative; but he now thought that he could perceive by various
signs that his venerable friend was right: that the rod had been
reversed, and that aversion had been transformed to love in the girl's
heart. The anguish of this discovery was hard to bear. And yet Paula had
never shown him such hearty warmth of manner, never had she spoken to
him in a voice so soft and so full of feeling, as this evening in the
garden. More cheerful and talkative than usual, she had constantly
turned to address him, while he had felt his pain and torment of mind
gradually eased, till in him too, sentiment had blossomed anew, and his
intellectual power had expanded. Never--so he believed--had he expressed
his thoughts better or more brilliantly than in that hour. Nor had she
withheld her approval; she had heartily agreed with his views; and
when, half an hour before midnight, he had gone with her to visit
his patients, rapturous hopes had sprung once more in his breast.
Ecstatically happy, like a man intoxicated, he had, by her own desire,
accompanied her into her sitting-room, and then--and there....

Poor, disappointed man, sitting on the divan in a dark corner of the
spacious room! In his soul hitherto the intellect had alone made itself
heard, the voice of the heart had never been listened to.

How he had found his way home he never knew. All he remembered was
that, in the course of duty, he had gone into the house of a man whose
wife--the mother of several children--he had left at noon in a dying
state; that he had seen her a corpse, surrounded by loud but sincere
mourners; that he had gone on his way, weighed down by their grief and
his own, and that he had entered his friend's rooms rather than his
own, to feel safe from himself. Life had no charm, no value for him now;
still, he felt ashamed to think that a woman could thus divert him from
the fairest aims of life, tha