too;
and if, in the evening, Maurice passed the former building, he would
see the janitor sitting at leisure in the middle of the pavement,
smoking his long black cigar. The old trees in the PROMENADE, and the
young striplings that followed the river in the LAMPESTRASSE, drooped
their brown leaves thick with dust; the familiar smell of roasting
coffee, which haunted most house- and stair-ways, was intensified; and
out of drains and rivers rose nauseous and penetrating odours, from
which there was no escape. Every three or four days, when the
atmosphere of the town had reached a pitch of unsavouriness which it
seemed impossible to surpass, sudden storms swept up, tropical in their
violence: blasts of thunder cracked like splitting beams; lightning
darted along the narrow streets; rain fell in white, sizzling sheets.
But the morning after, it was as hot as ever.

Maurice grew so accustomed to meet no one he knew, that one afternoon
towards the middle of August, he was pulled up by a jerk of surprise in
front of the PLEISSENBURG, on stumbling across Heinrich Krafft. He had
stopped and impulsively greeted the young man, before he recalled his
previous antipathy to him.

Krafft was sauntering along with his hands in his pockets, and, on
being accosted, he looked vaguely and somewhat moodily at Maurice. The
next moment, however, he laid a hand on the lappel of Maurice's coat,
and, without preamble, burst into a witty and obscene anecdote, which
had evidently been in his mind when they met. This story, and the fact
that, by the North Sea, he had stood before breakers twenty feet high,
were the only particulars Maurice bore away from their interview. His
previous impatience with such eccentricity returned, but none the less,
he looked grudgingly after the other's vanishing form.

A day or two later, towards evening, he saw Krafft again. As he was
going through an outlying street, he came upon a group of children, who
were amusing themselves by teasing a cat; the animal had been hit in
the eye by a stone, and cowered, terrified and blinded, against the
wall of a house. The children formed a half circle round it, and two of
the biggest boys held a young and lively dog by the collar, inciting it
and restraining it, and revelling in the cat's convulsive starts at
each capering bark.

While Maurice was considering how to expostulate with them, Krafft came
swiftly up behind, jerked two of the children apart, and, with a deft
an