“Ah, then,” I said, very gravely, “of course you can’t leave Homburg.”

He answered nothing, but looked askance at me, as if he were expecting me to laugh.  “Urge it strongly,” he said in a moment.  “Say it’s my duty—­that I must.”

I didn’t quite understand him, but, feathering the shaft with a harmless expletive, I told him that unless he followed my advice I would never speak to him again.

He got up, stood before me, and struck the ground with his stick.  “Good!” he cried; “I wanted an occasion to break a rule—­to leap a barrier.  Here it is.  I stay!”

I made him a mock bow for his energy.  “That’s very fine,” I said; “but now, to put you in a proper mood for Madame Blumenthal’s tea, we will go and listen to the band play Schubert under the lindens.”  And we walked back through the woods.

I went to see Pickering the next day, at his inn, and on knocking, as directed, at his door, was surprised to hear the sound of a loud voice within.  My knock remained unnoticed, so I presently introduced myself.  I found no company, but I discovered my friend walking up and down the room and apparently declaiming to himself from a little volume bound in white vellum.  He greeted me heartily, threw his book on the table, and said that he was taking a German lesson.

“And who is your teacher?” I asked, glancing at the book.

He rather avoided meeting my eye, as he answered, after an instant’s delay, “Madame Blumenthal.”

“Indeed!  Has she written a grammar?”

“It’s not a grammar; it’s a tragedy.”  And he handed me the book.

I opened it, and beheld, in delicate type, with a very large margin, an Historisches Trauerspiel in five acts, entitled “Cleopatra.”  There were a great many marginal corrections and annotations, apparently from the author’s hand; the speeches were very long, and there was an inordinate number of soliloquies by the heroine.  One of them, I remember, towards the end of the play, began in this fashion—­

“What, after all, is life but sensation, and sensation but deception?—­reality that pales before the light of one’s dreams as Octavia’s dull beauty fades beside mine?  But let me believe in some intenser bliss, and seek it in the arms of death!”

“It seems decidedly passionate,” I said.  “Has the tragedy ever been acted?”

“Never in public; but Madame Blumenthal tells me that she had it played at her own house in Berlin, and that she herself undertook the part of the heroine.”

Pickering’s unworldly life had not been of a sort to sharpen his perception of the ridiculous, but it seemed to me an unmistakable sign of his being under the charm, that this information was very soberly offered.  He was preoccupied, he was irresponsive to my experimental observations on vulgar topics—­the hot weather, the inn, the advent of Adelina Patti.  At last, uttering his thoughts, he announced that