He bowed with rather an ill grace, and was about to retire, when a certain peculiar turn of the neck as the lady acknowledged his salute, caught his eye and turned him to stone. Good God! this woman was Ida!
He stood there in a condition of mental paralysis. The whole fabric of his thinking and feeling for months of intense emotional experience had instantly been annihilated, and he was left in the midst of a great void in his consciousness out of touching-reach of anything. There was no sharp pang, but just a bewildered numbness. A few filaments only of the romantic feeling for Ida that filled his mind a moment before still lingered, floating about it, unattached to anything, like vague neuralgic feelings in an amputated stump, as if to remind him of what had been there.
All this was as instantaneous as a galvanic shock the moment he had recognized—let us not say Ida, but this evidence that she was no more. It occurred to him that the woman, who stood staring, was in common politeness entitled to some explanation. He was in just that state of mind when the only serious interest having suddenly dropped out of the life, the minor conventionalities loom up as peculiarly important and obligatory.
“You were Fraülein Ida Werner, and lived at No. —— —— strasse in 1866, nicht wahr?”
He spoke in a cold, dead tone, as if making a necessary but distasteful explanation to a stranger.
“Yes, truly,” replied the woman, curiously; “but my name is now Frau Stein,” glancing at the children, who had been staring open-mouthed at the queer man.
“Do you remember Karl Randall? I am he.”
The most formal of old acquaintances could hardly have recalled himself in a more indifferent manner.