A few passers-by had watched this singular performance from the avenue. He heard all sort of jokes that he did not understand. "Thank God!" he said to himself, "if I had allowed myself to do such a thing in my own dear home, the whole town would be talking of nothing else to-morrow, besides adding all sorts of exaggerations. But here--'Hier bin ich Mensch, hier darf ich's sein!' Long live golden liberty!"
He rode back to town in merry mood. He imagined that he could still feel the arms of the girl about his breast, and her warm breath on his face. His blood had not been cooled by his ride, as he had hoped, and the sharp trot to which he spurred on his horse did not help him. He gave up the reeking horse at the riding-school, and then turned into the Briennerstrasse, in order to sit awhile in the Court Garden, and eat an ice and nurse his dreams.
When he came back to the house where Julie lived, he checked himself suddenly. Who was that standing motionless by the garden fence, with his eyes fixed on the bright parterre window? Jansen?
Felix made a wide circuit to avoid him, and stood looking at him on the other side of the street in the shadow of the houses. For a good half hour he saw his friend opposite continue at his post. Then the window was closed by a heavy curtain, and, immediately after, the watcher at the gate tore himself away and departed slowly.
Felix did not follow him. He scorned to be a spy on the secret ways of his friend. What chance had disclosed to him gave him enough to think about for to-day, without being able to find a solution to the riddle.
BOOK II.
CHAPTER I.
It was unusually still in Angelica's studio, so still that one could plainly hear, through the thin wall that separated her from her neighbor, the cheerful squeak of his white mice. This was always a sign that their master was, as he expressed it, on the rampage, wielding his brush in the thick of the battle of Lützen.
Angelica, too, was very busy. But although she usually liked to chat over her work, to keep the people who sat to her from falling asleep, to-day she rarely opened her lips. It was the last sitting; the last touch, which, after all, is always a new beginning, was to be given to the picture--every stroke of the brush decided the fate of a nuance, the success or failure of an expression.
In order to work more surely, she had put on a pair of spectacles, that can scarcely be said to have improved her appearance, and the painting-jacket, on the left sleeve of which she was accustomed to wipe her brush, had burst open in the ardor of her work, and, with her lance-like maulstick and her shield-like palate, gave a certain pugnacious aspect to her good, honest face, as if she were engaged in a struggle for the release of the enchanted princess who sat in a chair opposite her, and who was also unusually quiet. Whether Julie was turning over in her mind some especially serious thought, or had, like all people sitting to a painter, merely fallen under the influence of a certain absent-minded melancholy, it was impossible to make out.