hts; he thought only of the fact that this gaucho turned
out to be a Dane; when a pause set in, and some one had to say something
he could not help exclaiming, "and I who said yesterday that you
reminded me of a gaucho!"

"Well," replied Thorbrogger, "that wasn't far from the truth; for
twenty-one years I have lived in the plains of La Plata, and in those
years certainly spent more time on horse-back than on foot."

And now he had come back to Europe!

Yes, he had sold his land and his sheep and had come back to have a look
around in the old world where he belonged, but to his shame he had
to confess that he often found it very much of a bore to travel about
merely for pleasure.

Perhaps, he was homesick for the prairies?

No, he had never had any special feeling for places and countries; he
thought it was only his daily work which he missed.

In that way they went on talking for a while. At last the custodian
appeared, hot and out of breath, with heads of lettuce under his arms
and a bunch of scarlet tomatoes in his hand, and they were admitted into
the small, stuffy collection of paintings, where they gained only the
vaguest impression of the yellow thunder-clouds and black waters of old
Vernet, but on the contrary told each other with considerable detail
of their lives and the happenings during all the years since they had
parted.

For it was he whom she had loved, at the time when she married another.
In the days which now followed they were much together, and the others
thinking that such old friends must have much to say to each other left
them often alone. In those days both soon noticed that however much
they might have changed during the course of the years, their hearts had
forgotten nothing.

Perhaps it was he who first became aware of this, for all the
uncertainty of youth, its sentimentality and its elegiac mood came upon
him simultaneously, and he suffered under it. It seemed out of place
to the mature man, that he should so suddenly be robbed of his peace of
life and the self-possession which he had acquired during the course of
time, and he wanted his love to bear a different stamp, wished it to be
graver, more subdued.

She did not feel herself younger, but it seemed to her as if a fountain
of tears that had been obstructed and dammed had burst open again and
begun to flow. There was great happiness and relief in crying, and these
tears gave her a feeling of richness; it was as if she had bec