"Like the black tablet in the doge's palace: Marino Falier, decapitatus pro crimine. Permit me to write down the number of the house. There--and now forgive this disagreeable visit, Madame. The messengers of the Council of Ten in Venice were notorious for their obligatory intrusiveness."
She took leave of him with a silent bend of the head; but as he was passing through the ante-room, she called him back to entreat him for God's sake to deal considerately with the poor girl, who had deserved a better fate. "Have no fear," he replied. "We children of the world are all sinners ourselves, and know how poor sinners feel."
Half an hour after, he knocked at the door of a garret in one of the most out of the way streets in Friedrichstadt. A man's voice called "come in!" Seated on a table in the deep recess of a window, to catch the last rays of light, was an odd little figure with his legs crossed under him, sewing busily on a woman's dress. At the mention of Fräulein Johanne's name the busy little man let his work fall, shook his head angrily, and exclaimed in his hoarse falsetto tone:
"Can you read, sir, or not? Pray look at the sign on the door, and see if there's not an inscription on it in large letters: 'Wachtel, Ladies' dressmaker.' The person whom you seek did live here, but is now entirely to set up for four flights of stairs. Of course the fall is first down stairs from the garret to the ground floor; after a time they go still farther down: into the cellar, and then five feet under ground. Besides, it isn't my affair; ladies' tailors are not responsible for the first fall of man. Why! Well of course you know that yourself. Ha! ha!" He laughed and took up his needle again.
"Does the young lady live alone?"
"Yes and no, according to the way you understand it. 'I'm lonely but not alone'--as Schiller says. But try yourself, sir; I believe she's no longer as timid about having evening visitors, as she used to be when she worked for me; I work for her now, but I'm better paid at any rate. This sort, you must know--"
"Does a certain Herr Lorinser happen to be with her, a clerical-looking, pale man, with a black beard?"
"Can't say, sir. It's not my business to keep the register. Mam'selle Johanne will be glad to tell you what you want to know--her present admirer is a clerk, in a banking house, and can't get away till the counting house is closed. So if you want a private conversation--ha! ha!"
Mohr silently nodded a farewell and left the grinning little man. A feeling of repugnance overpowered him, which only increased, when on reaching the entry outside of the first floor rooms he heard a girl's voice singing one of Offenbach's favorite airs.
His ring interrupted the song. Directly after, a slender young girl with singularly large sparkling eyes in her pale little face opened the door. "Is it you, Edward?" she exclaimed. Then perceiving her mistake, said without any special sign of embarrassment: "What do you want, sir?"