The first question Frederick asked after the storm of greeting had subsided, was, “I say, old boy, do you believe in telepathy?”

“Telepathy?  Not a bit,” replied the Friesian, and laughed a mighty laugh.  “I am scarcely thirty, and sound in mind and body.  I’m not an idiot.  I hope no Mr. Slade has turned your head like old Zoellner’s in Leipzig.  Have you come over to preside at a theosophical or spiritualistic meeting?  Then good-bye to our friendship, old fellow.”

This was the familiar tone to which the friends were accustomed from their university days.  It was infinitely refreshing to both to hear it again.  No conventions of any sort divided them.  Their relations were free of everything that hampers association in later years.

“You’ve been through a thing or two,” his friend said, when Frederick confirmed the newspaper account of his having witnessed the sinking of the Roland.  “I believe you’re a married man and have children and are living in Germany, and as an avocation are doing scientific work, while practising medicine as a vocation.  You were thinking of everything else in the world but a trip to America, which never had any charms for you.”

“Isn’t it weird,” said Frederick, “how one suddenly finds oneself in a place one never dreamt of, arriving there in ways most unforeseen and at a time most unforeseen?  And doesn’t it seem as if the life we lived eight years ago, which was so choke-full of actuality, of real living, had all of a sudden turned to nothing?”

Peter Schmidt proposed, since they were both peripatetic philosophers, to take a walk through the streets of New York.  Frederick went to consult Ingigerd.  He found that for the next few hours she would be completely taken up with dressmakers.  All she said was that she hoped to see him again at luncheon.  Soon after, the two friends were walking along the asphalt paths of Central Park, swept clean of snow, under the bare, snowy trees between snowy lawns, while the mad city around them filled the air with a hundred-tongued Dionysiac uproar.

Though there had been an interruption of eight years in their intercourse, they took up the threads of conversation as if they had parted only half an hour before.  Within a short time, each had told the other the most important facts of their lives during those eight years.  Frederick for his account of himself had to go back to the date of his marriage, the notice of which he had sent to Peter Schmidt.  Without departing from the truth, he related his story with a certain fancifulness, and though stating facts, mingled in psychological effects and spiritual crises.  He did not refrain from telling how he had been uprooted and torn this way and that.  The first and final achievement of his former life, he said, was that he had acquired the will to resignation, though the tone of his voice, as a result of his morning’s experience and his meeting with his best friend, was fresh and vigorous, by no means tinged with the drab of resignation.