When in the darkness of the lower hall he looked upward, he saw two faces which gazed after him with genuine feeling.
* * * * *
Out amid the common noises of the street he had the feeling as though he had returned from some far island of alien seas into the wonted current of life.
He shuddered at the thought of what lay before him.
Then he went toward the Tiergarten. A red afterglow eddied amid the trees. In the sky gleamed a harmony of delicate blue tints, shading into green. Great white clouds towered above, but rested upon the redness of the sunset.
The human stream flooded as always between the flickering, starry street-lamps of the Tiergartenstrasse. Each man and woman sought to wrest a last hour of radiance from the dying day.
Dreaming, estranged, Stueckrath made his way through the crowd, and hurriedly sought a lonely footpath that disappeared in the darkness of the foliage.
Again for a moment the thought seared him: "Take her and rebuild the structure of your life."
But when he sought to hold the thought and the accompanying emotion, it was gone. Nothing remained but a flat after taste—the dregs of a weary intoxication.
The withered leaves rustled beneath his tread. Beside the path glimmered the leaf-flecked surface of a pool.