“Nothing, thank you.”

She then requested permission to go out for about an hour and a half to purchase various trifles for the signorina.  Soon after, Frederick saw the excellent housekeeper, all muffled up, step from the front door into the wet, almost deserted street.

After he had made this observation, he became uneasy, lit a cigarette, screwed his right eye meditatively, and bit his lips.  The house was empty.  For that reason his heart was audibly knocking against his ribs.  Again the fantastic incalculableness of life struck him as so remarkable.  An occasion, a condition such as this he had scarcely hoped to reach in weeks, or even months, certainly not in the wild welter of New York.  From the noise of the steamer and the city, from the rushing and roaring of the Atlantic Ocean, he was suddenly plunged into the silence of the grave.  It affected him with a sense of desertion and oblivion.  In that city of four million inhabitants, each man was strenuously pursuing his own affairs, or was harnessed into an iron yoke of duties, which deafened and blinded him to everything beside the path he had to tread.

Frederick looked at his watch.  It was twelve minutes past ten.  His uneasiness increased.  He was unable to sit still.  Each nerve, each cell of his body was touched and excited by invisible forces storming upon him from all sides.  A force of this nature, penetrating walls, floors and ceilings, has been called by various names.  We speak of magnetism, of od, of electricity.  As for electricity, Frederick just then had a peculiar experience of it.  He was trying to find composure in front of the open fireplace; and whenever he touched metal with the tongs, crackling little sparks shot out.  Everything in the room seemed to be charged.  If he merely ran his finger tips lightly over the rug before the hearth, there were little flashes and reports, like the crack of a tiny whip.

“There they are,” he thought, smiling, “the Toilers of the Light.”  And while he racked his brain to recall in what book of fairy tales he had read of those diminutive elves, the dream he had had on the Roland occurred to him.  “Toilers of the Light, what are you doing?” he asked several times, and snatched after the sparks, as one snatches after flies in a fit of impatience and boredom.  It seemed to him that countless numbers of those little children of Lucifer were pricking his blood like so many dancing stars.  Even the air was filled with stars.  They clogged his breathing.  He arose and walked out into the hall.

As he paced up and down there for a while, undecided what to do, making as little sound on the bricks as possible, he looked into the kitchen, which, like the dining-room, was in the basement, and convinced himself that it was empty.  Then he softly ascended the marble steps to the next floor, where he tried with all his might to check the rise of a passion almost robbing him of his senses.  In that endeavour he entered the library, a room comfortably furnished and well equipped with appurtenances for reading and writing.  The walls were covered with views of ancient Rome and engravings by Piranesi.  But neither the city of the Tiber nor the grave of Cecilia Metella, nor the Colosseum, nor the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli had the power to engage his real attention.