“I was a fine fellow—­nothing too big for Mario Sarelli; the regiment looked to me.  Then she came—­with her eyes and her white dress, always white, like this one; the little mole on her chin, her hands for ever moving—­their touch as warm as sunbeams.  Then, no longer Sarelli this, and that!  The little house close to the ramparts!  Two arms, two eyes, and nothing here,” he tapped his breast, “but flames that made ashes quickly—­in her, like this ash—!” he flicked the white flake off his cigar.  “It’s droll!  You agree, hein?  Some day I shall go back and kill her.  In the meantime—­kummel!”

He stopped at a house close to the road, and stood still, his teeth bared in a grin.

“But I bore you,” he said.  His cigar, flung down, sputtered forth its sparks on the road in front of Harz.  “I live here—­good-morning!  You are a man for work—­your honour is your Art!  I know, and you are young!  The man who loves flesh better than his honour is a low type—­I am a low type.  I!  Mario Sarelli, a low type!  I love flesh better than my honour!”

He remained swaying at the gate with the grin fixed on his face; then staggered up the steps, and banged the door.  But before Harz had walked on, he again appeared, beckoning, in the doorway.  Obeying an impulse, Harz went in.

“We will make a night of it,” said Sarelli; “wine, brandy, kummel?  I am virtuous—­kummel it must be for me!”

He sat down at a piano, and began to touch the keys.  Harz poured out some wine.  Sarelli nodded.

“You begin with that?  Allegro—­piu—­presto!

“Wine—­brandy—­kummel!” he quickened the time of the tune:  “it is not too long a passage, and this”—­he took his hands off the keys—­“comes after.”

Harz smiled.

“Some men do not kill themselves,” he said.

Sarelli, who was bending and swaying to the music of a tarantella, broke off, and letting his eyes rest on the painter, began playing Schumann’s Kinderscenen.  Harz leaped to his feet.

“Stop that!” he cried.

“It pricks you?” said Sarelli suavely; “what do you think of this?” he played again, crouching over the piano, and making the notes sound like the crying of a wounded animal.

“For me!” he said, swinging round, and rising.

“Your health!  And so you don’t believe in suicide, but in murder?  The custom is the other way; but you don’t believe in customs?  Customs are only for Society?” He drank a glass of kummel.  “You do not love Society?”

Harz looked at him intently; he did not want to quarrel.

“I am not too fond of other people’s thoughts,” he said at last; “I prefer to think my own.

“And is Society never right?  That poor Society!”

“Society!  What is Society—­a few men in good coats?  What has it done for me?”

Sarelli bit the end off a cigar.

“Ah!” he said; “now we are coming to it.  It is good to be an artist, a fine bantam of an artist; where other men have their dis-ci-pline, he has his, what shall we say—­his mound of roses?”