As I expected, when we left the Jews’ quarter the elders of our party wished to return to the hotel.  But now, instead of rejoicing in this, as I had done beforehand, I felt a sudden overpowering impulse to go on at once to the bridge, and put an end to the suspense I had been wishing to protract.  I declared, with unusual decision, that I would get out of the carriage and walk on alone; they might return without me.  My father, thinking this merely a sample of my usual “poetic nonsense,” objected that I should only do myself harm by walking in the heat; but when I persisted, he said angrily that I might follow my own absurd devices, but that Schmidt (our courier) must go with me.  I assented to this, and set off with Schmidt towards the bridge.  I had no sooner passed from under the archway of the grand old gate leading an to the bridge, than a trembling seized me, and I turned cold under the midday sun; yet I went on; I was in search of something—­a small detail which I remembered with special intensity as part of my vision.  There it was—­the patch of rainbow light on the pavement transmitted through a lamp in the shape of a star.

CHAPTER II

Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown leaves still stood thick on the beeches in our park, my brother and Bertha were engaged to each other, and it was understood that their marriage was to take place early in the next spring.  In spite of the certainty I had felt from that moment on the bridge at Prague, that Bertha would one day be my wife, my constitutional timidity and distrust had continued to benumb me, and the words in which I had sometimes premeditated a confession of my love, had died away unuttered.  The same conflict had gone on within me as before—­the longing for an assurance of love from Bertha’s lips, the dread lest a word of contempt and denial should fall upon me like a corrosive acid.  What was the conviction of a distant necessity to me?  I trembled under a present glance, I hungered after a present joy, I was clogged and chilled by a present fear.  And so the days passed on:  I witnessed Bertha’s engagement and heard her marriage discussed as if I were under a conscious nightmare—­knowing it was a dream that would vanish, but feeling stifled under the grasp of hard-clutching fingers.

When I was not in Bertha’s presence—­and I was with her very often, for she continued to treat me with a playful patronage that wakened no jealousy in my brother—­I spent my time chiefly in wandering, in strolling, or taking long rides while the daylight lasted, and then shutting myself up with my unread books; for books had lost the power of chaining my attention.  My self-consciousness was heightened to that pitch of intensity in which our own emotions take the form of a drama which urges itself imperatively on our contemplation, and we begin to weep, less under the sense of our suffering than at the thought of it.