“Perhaps he made you nervous?” he queried.
“Perhaps,” she answered dryly.
There was a long, long pause. The band now played “Doch Einer Schoner Zeit,” and some peasants in the native costume sang the words.
Finally he pushed his plate away and crossed his arms upon the table; his eyes were very earnest.
“Once I loved,” he said; “I have speak of that to you before.”
She made no reply.
“It was no passion of a whole life, but for a boy, as I was then, it was much. I was quite young, and, Gott! how I did love! She was such a woman as says, ‘I will make this man absolutely mad;’ and she did so. She made me crazy—tout-à-fait fou; and then, when I could only breathe by her eyes, she showed me that she was uncaring!”
He stopped, stared sightlessly out at the black water beyond, and then turned towards her.
“Is it so in your mind towards me?” he asked, and in his voice and eyes was that heartrending pathos which once in a lifetime a man’s soul may come to share with childhood’s heavy sorrows.
She drew a quick breath. The pointed roofs of the Inselhaus off there beyond the trees printed themselves darkly and forever upon her brain; the scattered lights in the windows, the inky spots where the ivy trailings were massed thickest,—all those details and a dozen others were in that instant photographed upon her spirit, destined to henceforth form the background to the scene whose centre was the face opposite to her, all of the expression of which seemed to have condensed itself into the burning gaze of those two great eyes, so vastly sad.