t she was probably alive and
now in the prime of her beauty. After a period of feverish and
impassioned excitement he wrote a letter full of wild regret and
beseeching, and an ineffable tenderness. Then he waited. After a long
time it came back from the German dead-letter office. There was no
person of the name at the address. She had left Bonn, then. Hastily
setting his affairs in order, he sailed for Germany on the next
steamer.

The incidents of the voyage were a blank in his mind. On reaching Bonn
he went straight from the station to the old house in ---- strasse. As
he turned into it from the scarcely less familiar streets leading
thither, and noted each accustomed landmark, he seemed to have just
returned to tea from an afternoon lecture at the university. In every
feature of the street some memory lurked, and as he passed threw out
delaying tendrils, clutching at his heart. Rudely he broke away,
hastening on to that house near the end of the street, in each of
whose quaint windows fancy framed the longed-for face. She was not
there, he knew, but for a while he stood on the other side of the
street, unmindful of the stares and jostling of the passers-by, gazing
at the house-front, and letting himself imagine from moment to moment
that her figure might flit across some window, or issue from the door,
basket in hand, for the evening marketing, on which journey he had so
often accompanied her. At length, crossing the street, he inquired for
the Werner family. The present tenants had never heard the name.
Perhaps the tenants from whom they had received the house might be
better informed. Where were they? They had moved to Cologne. He next
went to the Bonn police-office, and from the records kept there, in
which pretty much everything about every citizen is set down,
ascertained that several years previous Herr Werner had died of
apoplexy, and that no one of the name was now resident in the city.
Next day he went to Cologne, hunted up the former tenants of the
house, and found that they remembered quite distinctly the Werner
family, and the death of the father, and only bread-winner. It had
left the mother and daughter quite without resources, as Randall had
known must probably have been the case. His informants had heard that
they had gone to Duesseldorf.

His search had become a fever. After waiting seven years, a delay of
ten minutes was unendurable. The trains seemed to creep. And yet, on
reaching Duesseldorf, h