e everybody who passed through the
town? Only think!"

"I am not everybody!" said the engraver, and stared at the table before
him as if he were looking upon the most moving sights. Perhaps he saw
himself, his innermost being, his past, all the facts and events that
he knew and that concerned no one else.

Beate Rauchfuss felt as if some one who belonged to her had come home.
She would not have been surprised if the visitor had said to her,
"Well, how is it? Have I changed much in all this time? I hope you will
understand me as well as you used to." She spoke no word, or as good as
none. If she had let herself go, she would have had to pour out her
whole heart to him.

This was a man--a live man. She knew it. None of the people of her
acquaintance, it seemed to her, had ever been so much alive. They were
all lulled into a stupor by habit becoming second nature. Her father?
She half suspected that he might have been alive, if he had chosen. But
it hadn't suited him to, and he had drunk to stupefy himself. It was no
doubt from him that she inherited the longing to be alive and to live
among the living. She could not take her eyes from the keen, alert
face, and she felt a stream of life and power flowing to her from him.

But he scarcely noticed her, and went on arguing in his curt,
pugnacious way with the suitors, who looked at him as if he were some
mad animal.

When the party began to break up, she said to the Raven-mother firmly
and audibly, so that they all heard it, "Herr Kosch will stay here. It
is too late now for him to go down into Weimar to find an inn. Have the
guest-room got ready for him."

These words forced themselves out of her very soul. She seemed to have
to lift a ton's weight to speak them. She would not give him up!

And he stayed.

When all had gone, she had a few short moments alone with him in the
living-room. He stood with his back to the window and looked about the
room. "What will these gentlemen say to your entertaining a chance
stranger here? And what do _you_ think of it?"

"I? I think that it is too late for you to find lodgings down in
Weimar."

"Oh," he said, "I'm not a princess. I'd have crept into any hole that
offered me shelter."

She gazed at him in silence, and blushed a rosy red. There was
something of merry mockery in the glance that he fixed on her. "Ah ...
women ... women!" he said lightly.

It was as if something had seized her by the throat and strangled her.
"