eye and turned him to stone. Good God! this woman was Ida!

He stood there in a condition of mental paralysis. The whole fabric of
his thinking and feeling for months of intense emotional experience
had instantly been annihilated, and he was left in the midst of a
great void in his consciousness out of touching-reach of anything.
There was no sharp pang, but just a bewildered numbness. A few
filaments only of the romantic feeling for Ida that filled his mind a
moment before still lingered, floating about it, unattached to
anything, like vague neuralgic feelings in an amputated stump, as if
to remind him of what had been there.

All this was as instantaneous as a galvanic shock the moment he had
recognized--let us not say Ida, but this evidence that she was no
more. It occurred to him that the woman, who stood staring, was in
common politeness entitled to some explanation. He was in just that
state of mind when the only serious interest having suddenly dropped
out of the life, the minor conventionalities loom up as peculiarly
important and obligatory.

"You were Frauelein Ida Werner, and lived at No. ---- ---- strasse in
1866, _nicht wahr_?"

He spoke in a cold, dead tone, as if making a necessary but
distasteful explanation to a stranger.

"Yes, truly," replied the woman, curiously; "but my name is now Frau
Stein," glancing at the children, who had been staring open-mouthed at
the queer man.

"Do you remember Karl Randall? I am he."

The most formal of old acquaintances could hardly have recalled
himself in a more indifferent manner.

"_Herr Gott im Himmel!_" exclaimed the woman with the liveliest
surprise and interest. "Karl! Is it possible. Yes, now I recognize
you. Surely! surely!"

She clapped one hand to her bosom, and dropped on the bench to recover
herself. Fleshy people, overcome by agitation, are rather disagreeable
objects. Randall stood looking at her with a singular expression of
aversion on his listless face. But after panting a few times the
woman recovered her vivacity and began to ply him vigorously with
exclamations and questions, beaming the while with delighted interest.
He answered her like a school-boy, too destitute of presence of mind
to do otherwise than to yield passively to her impulse. But he made no
inquiries whatever of her, and did not distantly allude to the reason
of his presence in Germany. As he stood there looking at her, the real
facts about that matter struck him as so ab