"What is it the flowers mean when they ask him not to be harsh to their
sister, eh?" he asked, looking down at her curiously and wrinkling his
dull red forehead.

Thea glanced at him in surprise. "I suppose he thinks they are asking
him not to be harsh to his sweetheart--or some girl they remind him of."

"And why TRAURIGER, BLASSER MANN?"

They had come back to the grape arbor, and Thea picked out a sunny place
on the bench, where a tortoise-shell cat was stretched at full length.
She sat down, bending over the cat and teasing his whiskers. "Because he
had been awake all night, thinking about her, wasn't it? Maybe that was
why he was up so early."

Wunsch shrugged his shoulders. "If he think about her all night already,
why do you say the flowers remind him?"

Thea looked up at him in perplexity. A flash of comprehension lit her
face and she smiled eagerly. "Oh, I didn't mean 'remind' in that way! I
didn't mean they brought her to his mind! I meant it was only when he
came out in the morning, that she seemed to him like that,--like one of
the flowers."

"And before he came out, how did she seem?"

This time it was Thea who shrugged her shoulders. The warm smile left
her face. She lifted her eyebrows in annoyance and looked off at the
sand hills.

Wunsch persisted. "Why you not answer me?"

"Because it would be silly. You are just trying to make me say things.
It spoils things to ask questions."

Wunsch bowed mockingly; his smile was disagreeable. Suddenly his face
grew grave, grew fierce, indeed. He pulled himself up from his clumsy
stoop and folded his arms. "But it is necessary to know if you know some
things. Some things cannot be taught. If you not know in the beginning,
you not know in the end. For a singer there must be something in the
inside from the beginning. I shall not be long in this place, may-be,
and I like to know. Yes,"--he ground his heel in the gravel,--"yes, when
you are barely six, you must know that already. That is the beginning of
all things; DER GEIST, DIE PHANTASIE. It must be in the baby, when it
makes its first cry, like DER RHYTHMUS, or it is not to be. You have
some voice already, and if in the beginning, when you are with
things-to-play, you know that what you will not tell me, then you can
learn to sing, may-be."

Wunsch began to pace the arbor, rubbing his hands together. The dark
flush of his face had spread up under the iron-gray bristles on his
head. He was talking to h