"I'm not going to have you bolting away in this inexplicable sort of way,' Herr Elias roared at her, wrathfully in the extreme. 'The son-in-law's a melancholy sort of customer, and as jealous as the Grand Turk. Just you keep at home, d'ye see, or we shall have all the fat in the fire directly. My partner's sitting in there, howling and groaning, because you're out of the way somewhere.'
"Christina cast a look of amazement at the bookkeeper, who replied by a significant glance towards the office-cupboard where Herr Elias kept the cinnamon-water.
"'Better go in and comfort the intended,' he said, going back to the office. Christina went to her own room, just to put on some other 'things;' give out the week's washing; make the necessary arrangements with the cook about the Sunday dinner, and hear the gossip of the town during that process, and then go at once and see what was the matter with the 'intended.'
"Yon know, dear reader, that we should all of us--had we been in Traugott's place--have had to go through the essential stages of the condition. No escape from that. After the despair comes a benumbed, heavy brooding, in which the 'crisis' takes place; and then the condition passes into a gentle sorrow, in which Nature knows how to apply her remedies efficaciously.
"In this stage of heavy, but beneficent sorrow, Traugott was sitting some days afterwards on the Karlsberg, gazing once more at the waves as they beat upon the shore, and the grey mists that lay over Hela. But not, this time, was he trying to read the future. All that he had hoped and anticipated was past.
"'Ah!' he sighed, 'my calling for art was a bitter deception. Felizitas was the phantom which lured me to believe in what never existed save in the insane dreams of a fever-sick fool. It is all over. I fight no more! Back to my prison! So let it be, and have done with it!'
"Traugott worked in the office again, and the marriage-day with Christina was fixed once more. The day before it, Traugott was standing in the Artus Hof, looking, not without inward heart-breaking sorrow, at the fateful forms of the burgomaster and his page, when he noticed the broker to whom Berklinger had been trying to sell his paper. Almost involuntarily, without thinking what he was doing, he went up to him and asked him:
"'Did you know a strange old man with a black, curly beard, who used to come here some time ago, with a handsome lad?'
"'Of course I did,' said the broker: Godfried Berklinger, the mad painter.'
"'Then have you any idea what's become of him?--where he's living now?'