elf and my sweetheart to fear the
length of the interval; which did not seem to me at first glance so
intolerable as I often felt it afterward--in sighs and misery.

"My sweetheart, too, threw back her little head and said: 'Yes, we will
wait.'--Afterward, it is true, when it came to our last parting, she
fell out of my arms as though she were dead, and I thought she would
never open her eyes again. Even now I don't know how I succeeded, in
spite of it all, in tearing myself away.

"And this three years' separation itself! If I had only been a man of
sense--that is, if I had been another than myself--I should have
settled down somewhere in Germany, and taken up some task at which
I could have worked myself tired--to fight down my unprofitable
lover's-melancholy. Why could not I devote my three years to making
myself a perfect agriculturist, or a prominent jurist, or a politician,
or something that is of some use in the world? To make one's self so
completely master of some department of life or knowledge that one
knows every square foot of it is rather an absurd and commonplace
consolation, to be sure; but it is better, after all, than an
objectless activity, a love nourished on prison-fare, and a longing for
freedom that at last makes one look upon mere change as something
desirable.

"Even then I thought of my old Daedalus. I was on the very point of
falling upon you in your studio, and, for want of a smooth, girlish
cheek to caress, of trying my hand on a soft bit of clay. Just then I
chanced upon an opportunity to go to England; there I stayed until I
was ripe for America; and he who once sets foot in the New World, and
hasn't left any very pressing business behind him in the Old, can get
rid of a few years of his life without knowing exactly how he has done
it. It is enough to tell you that I had already reached Rio, traveling
by way of San Francisco and Mexico, when I said to myself one day that
if I did not want to prolong my exile voluntarily, and so appear to my
betrothed in rather a bad light, I must take the next steamer that
sailed for Havre, in order to land at last, after all this wandering
over the wide world, in the harbor of my wedded bliss.

"I had written regularly to my betrothed every month--beautiful
diary-like love-letters--and had received with equal regularity letters
from her, which, to speak honestly, had now and then irritated me
greatly; so that we had already had (on paper) all manner o