to the windows from which their friend so often had waved to them. No,
she could not forgive Paul for showing so little comprehension of her
feelings.

The stay in the Black Forest, whose velvety slopes reminded them too
much of the Swiss meadows and from whose points of view you could look
over to the Alps on a clear day, became a torture to both the man and
woman. They felt they must get away; the dark firs, the immense green
forest became too monotonous for them. Should they not try some seaside
resort for once? The sea is ever new. And it was also just the season
for the seaside. The wind blew already over the stubble in the fields,
as they drove down to the plain.

They chose a Belgian watering-place, one in which the visitors dress
a great deal, and in which quite a cosmopolitan set of people offer
something new to the eye every day. They both felt it, they had
remained much too long in mountain solitudes.

During the first days the gay doings amused them, but then Paul and
his wife, between whom something like a barrier had tried to push
itself lately, both agreed all at once: this sauntering up and down of
men who looked like fools, of women who if they did not belong to the
demi-monde successfully imitated it, was not for them. Let them only
get away.

The man proposed they should give up travelling entirely and return
to Berlin a little earlier, but Kate would not listen to it. She had a
secret dread of Berlin--oh, would she have to go back to her old
life again? So far she had never asked herself what she had really
expected from these long months of travel; but she had hoped for
something--certainly. What?

Oh dear, now she would be so much alone again, and there was
nothing, nothing that really filled her life entirely.

No, she was not able to return to Berlin yet. She told her husband
that she felt she had not quite recovered yet--she was certainly
anaemic, she was suffering from poorness of blood. She ought to have
gone to Schwalbach, Franzensbad or some other iron springs long
ago--who knows, perhaps many things would be different then.

He was not impatient--at least he did not show it--for he was moved
with a deep compassion for her. Of course she should go to some iron
springs; they ought to have tried them long ago, have made a point of
it.

The Belgian doctor sent them to the well-known baths at Spa.

They arrived there full of hope. In her the hope was quite genuine.
"You will see," sh