. Ingeborg, the
fair-haired Inga, was dressed in bright colors, as she was wont to be
in M. Knaak's dancing class. The light, flowered dress only reached to
her ankles, and about her shoulders she wore a broad, V-shaped fichu of
white tulle, leaving her soft, supple throat free. Her hat hung on one
arm by its knotted ribbons. She was perhaps a little less grown-up than
of old, simply wearing her wonderful braid wound about her head; but
Hans Hansen looked as he always did. He had on his seaman's jacket with
the gold buttons, over which the broad blue collar lay on shoulders and
back; the sailor's cap with the short ribbons he was holding in one
hand, swinging it carelessly back and forth. Ingeborg kept her
elongated eyes cast down, perhaps a little embarrassed by the gaze of
the breakfasters. But Hans Hansen turned his head squarely toward the
table, as if defying the world, and mustered with his steel-blue eyes
one face after another, challengingly and as it were contemptuously; he
even dropped Ingeborg's hand and swung his cap back and forth more
vehemently, to show what sort of a man he was. So the couple walked
past Tonio Kroeger's eyes, with the quiet blue sea as a background,
traversed the entire length of the hall, and vanished through the
opposite door into the music-room.

This took place at half past eleven, and while the regular guests were
still at their meal, the company in the adjoining room and on the
verandah broke up and left the hotel by the side entrance, without any
one having set foot in the dining-room. They could be heard climbing
into the wagons outside amid jest and laughter, and one conveyance
after the other crunchingly got under way and rolled off along the high
road ...

"So they are coming back?" asked Tonio Kroeger.

"That they are," said the fish-dealer. "And God help us. They have
ordered music, you must know, and I sleep right over the hall."

"That will be a nice change," repeated Tonio Kroeger. Then he stood up
and went out.

He spent the day as he had spent the others, on the shore and in the
woods, holding a book in his lap and blinking at the sun. He
entertained only one idea: that they would come back and have a dance
in the hall, as the fish-dealer had promised; and he did nothing but
look forward to this with an anxious and sweet joy such as he had not
experienced for many long, dead years. Once, by some chain of ideas, he
had a fleeting recollection of a distant acquainta