She bowed her head upon her clasped hands, and neither moved nor answered.
Rudolf went close to her and laid his hand on her shoulder. A long shudder passed visibly and perceptibly through her whole frame, and she buried her face still more closely in her hands.
He understood her—
The first signal of bell ringing sounded, which announced the closing of the cemetery. Rudolf cast a hasty glance towards the entrance. His wife and his brother-in-law, with whom he had appointed this place of meeting, had just appeared there and were looking in every direction. Rudolf glanced once more at the kneeling supplicant, then with a slow, noiseless, faltering step he left the circle of flowers. He passed down the wide avenue as though walking in a dream. When he had nearly reached the gate he stopped and turned for the last time. The western sky was steeped in the glow of sunset. A light mist was rising from the damp ground, filling the paths of the cemetery and effacing the outlines of the human beings and the monuments. Shrouded by these floating vapours, Pauline's motionless dark figure stood forth in strong relief against the bright sky, and seemed to be gradually merging into a background of flaming crimson sunset.
Rudolf felt as if he were beholding his own youth fade and melt into white cloudlets of mist.
II.
ANOTHER WAY.
"So we have met again, old fellow?" said Wolf Breuning, with heartfelt pleasure, filling his friend Sigmund Friese's glass with wine.
"May it not be so long before the next meeting," cried Sigmund, as he touched glasses and drank.
Wolf Breuning, a tall, handsome man, with bold blue eyes and a long, parted beard, which seemed as though it was woven of threads of red gold, was the manager of a chemical factory in Paris. Sigmund Friese, shorter in stature, with a gentle, somewhat sensitive face, a short, fair, curly beard, and hair aristocratically thin, which already suggested a diplomatic bald head, was teaching mathematics in an American university. Both were natives of South Germany, friends from childhood, and had once plunged into the flood of life from the same spot on the shore, but were afterward washed far apart.