, flat-arched windows of one pane each, that winked out
of the red-tiled roofs like sleepy eyes, seemed to leer drunkenly at
him as they scudded by.

Ronald Wyde's account of those days in Dresden was vague and misty. He
crept along the bustling streets of that sombre, gray city, that
seemed to look more natural by cloud-light than in the full sunshine,
feeling continually within him a struggle between the two incompatible
natures now so strangely blended. Each day he kept up the contest
manfully, passing by the countless beer-cellars and drinking-booths
with an assumption of firmness and resolution that oozed slowly away
toward nightfall, when the animal body of the late Hans Kraut would
contrive to get the better of the animating principle of Ronald Wyde;
the refined nature would yield to the toper's brute-craving, with an
awful sense of its deep degradation in so succumbing, and, before
midnight, Hans was gloriously drunk, to Ronald's intense grief.

Time passed somehow. He had memories of sunny lounges on the
Bruhl'sche Terrace, looking on the turbid flow of the eddied Elbe, and
watching the little steamboats that buzzed up and down the city's
flanks, settling now and then, like gad-flies, to drain it of a few
drops of its human life. Well-known friends, whose hands he had
grasped not a week before, passed him unheedingly; all save one,
who eyed him for a moment, said "Poor devil!" in an undertone, and
dropped a silber-gro' into his maimed hand. He felt glad of even this
lame sympathy in his lowness; but most of all he prized the moistened
glance of pity that flashed upon him from the great dark eyes of a
lovely girl who passed him now and then as he slouched along. Once, a
being as degraded and scurvy as his own outward self, turned to him,
called him "Dutzbruder," asked him how he left them all in Berlin,
stared at Ronald's blank look of non-recognition, and passed on with a
muttered curse on his own stupidity in mistaking a stranger, in broad
daylight, for his crony Kraut.

Another memory was of the strange lassitude that seemed to almost
paralyze him after even moderate exertion, and caused him to drop
exhausted on a bench on the terrace when he had shuffled over less
than half its length. More than once the suspicion crept upon him
that only a portion of his vitality now remained to him, and that
its greater part lay mysteriously coiled in Herr Lebensfunke's
life-magnet. And this, in turn, broadened into a d