an as though every joy had disappeared with
the emerald green meadow in the Alps, in which she had painted the
lovely children. There was the same old nervous twitch in her face, the
corners of her mouth drooped slightly and she cried very easily. Paul
Schlieben watched his wife with positive dismay. Oh dear, had it all
been in vain, the giving up of his work, all this travelling about
without making any plans that was so fatiguing? Had the old melancholy
frame of mind taken possession of her again?

When he saw her sitting there so disinclined to exert herself, her
hands lying idle in her lap, a feeling akin to fury came over him. Why
did she not do something? Why did she not paint? That confounded meadow
in the Alps was surely not the only place where she could work. Was it
not beautiful here as well?

They had settled down in the Black Forest. But it was in vain that
he hoped from day to day that one of the quiet green wooded valleys or
one of the nut-brown maidens of the Black Forest with her cherry-red
hat and enormous red umbrella, as Vautier has painted them, would tempt
her to bring out her painting materials. She felt no inclination--nay,
she had positively a kind of dread of touching her brushes again.

He reproached himself bitterly in secret. Would it not have been
better to have left her that pleasure and not have interfered?
Still--the thing would have had to end some time, and the longer it had
lasted the more difficult the separation would have been. But he had
made up his mind about one thing, they would return to Berlin again
late in the autumn. With the best will in the world he would not be
able to stand it any longer. He was heartily tired of this wandering
from hotel to hotel, this lounging about the world with nothing to show
for it but an occasional short article for the papers, a chatty account
of a journey to some corner of the earth of which people knew but
little. He longed for a home of his own again, and felt a great desire
to return to his business, which he had often looked upon as a fetter
and so prosaic whilst he was in it. But Kate! When he thought of her
again spending many hours alone at home, with no interests beyond
herself and her reading for in her state of hypersensitiveness she
found little pleasure in associating with other women--a feeling of
hopelessness came over him. Then there would be the same sad eyes
again, the same melancholy smile, the old irritable moods from whic