is
own heart, a pale face, only too well known, from which the mask had
just fallen, and which, despite its frightened, supplicating look,
stared up at him like the head of Medusa.

CHAPTER VIII.

When he started up, late in the morning, after a short sleep, and saw
the snow drifting sadly down outside the window, the face at once rose
up before him again; and the frightened look of those blue eyes, that
he had hoped never to see more, and that now came to begin anew their
designs upon his happiness, made him shudder even more than the harsh
breath of the winter morning. And yet at first he had difficulty in
believing that it had really happened. It was only from his great
exhaustion that he realized what a storm he had passed through.

He was surprised himself at the stolid, torpid, icy calmness with which
he was able to look back on the frightful scene, as if the apparition
of the night, that yesterday made his hair stand on end, had no power
over him in broad daylight. He thought about the loss of his faithful
old companion too, as something that had happened long ago. But he was
pained by the thought that he had let the faithful animal be buried in
his masquerade trappings, with the gaudy ribbons and the guitar on his
back. He even went so far as to seriously deliberate whether he should
not have the grave opened again and cleared of all the tawdry finery.
However, he put it off until evening; and when evening came he had much
more pressing matters to attend to.

He was firmly resolved to put an end to this condition of affairs; to
tear the ever-rankling and festering barb from out the wound, let it
cost what it might. How this could best be done he did not know as yet.
But upon one point his mind was definitely made up; he owed it to Julie
to render a repetition of such scenes impossible.

He left the studio and went into the city. He directed his steps to the
hotel where the Russian countess was staying. To his amazement, he
learned there that no one had ever heard of this Madame St.-Aubain,
which was the name Rosenbusch had given him the preceding evening. The
porter did, indeed, remember a person such as Jansen described; the
lady spent the whole day with the countess no later than yesterday. But
she was not stopping in the hotel, and he had not learned what her name
was.

He would speak about it to the countess herself: could he see her for a
moment? asked the sculpto