Albertine withdrew her hand, but only to take off her glove, and then give the hand back to this lucky youngster. He was just going to kiss it fervently, when the Commissionsrath broke in with a
"Oh! I say! How chilly it's getting! I wish I had brought my great coat! Put on your shawl, Tiny! It's a fine Turkish shawl, my dear painter--cost fifty ducats. Wrap yourself up in it, Tiny; we must be getting home. Good-bye, my dear sir."
Edmund was here inspired by a happy thought. He took out his cigar case and offered the Commissionsrath a third Havannah.
"I really am excessively obliged to you," the Commissionsrath said, delighted; "you really are most kind. The police don't let one smoke walking about in the Thiergarten, for fear of the grass getting burnt; one enjoys a pipe or a cigar more for that very reason."
Bosswinkel went up to the lamp to light the cigar, and Edmund took advantage of his doing so to whisper to Albertine, very shyly, that he hoped she would let him walk home with her. She put her arm in his, they went on together, and Bosswinkel, when he joined them, seemed to consider it a matter of course that Edmund was going to walk with them all the way to town.
Anybody who has once been young, and in love--or who is both now at this present time (there are many who have never been either the one or the other)--will understand how Edmund, at Albertine's side, thought he was hovering over the tops of the trees, rather than walking through amongst them; up among the gleaming clouds, rather than down upon the earth.
Rosalind, in Shakespeare's 'As You Like It,' says that the "marks" of a man in love are "a lean cheek, a blear eye and sunken, an unquestionable spirit, a beard neglected, hose ungartered, bonnet unhanded, sleeve unbuttoned, shoe untied, and everything demonstrating a careless desolation." But those marks were as little seen in Edmund as in Orlando. Like the latter, however, who marred all the trees of the forest with carving his mistress's name on them, hung odes on the whitethorns, and elegies on the bramble-bushes, Edmund spoilt quantities of paper, parchment, canvas and colours, in besinging his beloved in verses which were wretched enough, and in drawing her, and painting her, without ever succeeding in making her in the least like--so far did his fancy soar above his capability. When to this was added the peculiar, unmistakable somnambulistic look of the love-sick, and a fitting amount of sighing at all times and seasons, it was not to be wondered at that the old goldsmith saw into his young friend's condition.
"H'm," he said; "you don't seem to think what an undesirable thing it is to fall in love with a girl who is engaged. For Albertine Bosswinkel is as good as engaged already to Tussmann, the Clerk of the Privy Chancery."
This terrible piece of news sent Edmund into the wildest despair. Leonhard waited patiently till the first paroxysm was past, and then asked if he really wanted to marry Albertine. Edmund declared that was the dearest wish of his heart, and implored the goldsmith to help him as much as ever he could to beat Tussmann out of the field, and win the lovely lady himself.
What the goldsmith thought and said was that a young artist might fall in love as much as ever he liked, but to marry straight away was a very different affair; and that was just why young Sternbald never cared to marry, and, for all he knew, was still unmarried up to that hour.