might, and she moulded his thoughts about her till they clung to her and burned.  He did not seriously think to meet her again in the Schloss, if he thought of it at all, for he knew of course that she must have been a bird of passage, only pausing an instant on that hot day to visit some scene long familiar to her memory.  And of course, like a true philosophical student, he did not attempt to explain to himself his own conduct, nor to catalogue the reasons for and against a daily visit to the old castle.

So the week passed, and another after it, and one day, late in the afternoon, Claudius descended the hill and went up as usual to his chamber above the river, to spend an hour indoors before going to supper.  It was a beautiful evening, and he left his door partly open on to the landing that the breeze might blow through the room as he sat by the window.  A book was in his hand before he had sat many moments, from sheer force of habit; but he did not read.  The sounds of the street rose pleasantly to his ear as the little boys and girls played together across each other’s doorsteps.  To tell the truth, it all seemed very far off, much farther than three flights of steps from the little crowd below to the solitary nest of learning aloft where he sat; and Dr. Claudius was, in his thoughts, incalculably far away from the shoemaker’s Hans and the tinman’s Gretel and their eight-year-old flirtation.  Claudius was flirting with his fancies, and drawing pretty pictures in the smoke, with dark eyes and masses of black hair; and then he moved uneasily, and came back to his threadbare proposition that he was old, and that it was absurd that he should be.

“Ah! what would I not give to enjoy it all—­to feel I could wish one moment to remain!” He sighed and leaned back in the straight-backed chair.  The door creaked slightly, he thought it was the evening wind.  It creaked again; he turned his head, and his gaze remained riveted on the opening.  A beautiful pair of dark eyes were fixed on him, deep and searching, and on meeting his, a great silky black head was pushed forward into the room, and a magnificent black hound stalked slowly across the floor and laid his head on the Doctor’s knee with a look of evident inquiry.

Claudius was fond of animals, and caressed the friendly beast, wondering to whom he might belong, and speculating whether the appearance of the dog heralded the approach of a visitor.  But the dog was not one of those that he knew by sight in the streets of Heidelberg—­one of those superb favourites of the students who are as well known as the professors themselves to every inhabitant of a university town in Germany.  And the Doctor stroked the beautiful head and listened for steps upon the stairs.  Before long he heard an ominous stumbling, as of some one unfamiliar with the dark and narrow way, and in a moment more a young man stood in the doorway, dazzled by the flood of the evening sunshine that faced him.