The breaking of Wilhelm’s relations with Loulou left a great blank in his life.  Up till now he had had in pleasant, hopeful hours, an object to which all the paths in his life led him, to which his thoughts were drawn as a ship steers for a distant yet secure harbor; now the object was gone, and when he looked forward to his future it seemed like the gray surface of the sea at dusk, formless, limitless, without meaning or interest.  Even the painful doubt he had been in, his hesitation between the resolve to persevere in the engagement, or to renounce it, the fight between his intelligence and his inclinations, had become familiar to him, and had filled his thoughts by day and his dreams by night.  These must now all be renounced.  If for the last half-year his love had been only a quiet happiness, or a hardly-defined desire, it was at any rate an occupation for his mind, and he missed the employment very greatly.

He became quieter than ever; his face lost its youthful, healthy color, and he appeared like the typical lover famed in classic story.  But his friends did not laugh at him; they bore with him, treated him gently, as if he had been a disappointed girl.  Paul, who was filling the place of an invalided professor of agricultural chemistry, and working hard after the college term began, found time to come every day for a long walk in the Thiergarten, and resigned himself to long philosophical discussions which so far had not been at all to his taste.  Dr. Schrotter seldom had any spare time during the day; but Wilhelm always took tea with him in the evenings.

Did Bhani know anything of his story?

Had her womanly instinct guessed that his careworn, melancholy expression betrayed an unhappy love story—­a subject so sympathetic to women?  Anyhow she anticipated every means of serving him, and her glance betrayed an almost shamefaced sympathy.

One November evening they were sitting at the little drum-shaped table in the Indian drawing-room; the teaurn steaming, and Bhani standing near, ready to obey her master’s slightest wish.  Schrotter touched on the wound in Wilhelm’s heart hitherto so tenderly avoided.

“My friend,” he said, “it is time that you came to yourself.  It is obvious that you are still grieving, instead of fighting against your dreams; you give way to them without a struggle.”

Wilhelm hung his head.  “You are right.  It is foolish; for I see that I do not love the girl deeply enough to spoil my life.”

“Come now.  You were more in love than you thought; but it is always so; even in pure and passionless natures human nature is very strong, and the first young and pretty girl who comes near enough to you brings out all the dormant feelings, and reason disappears.  People often do the maddest things in this period of unrest, which they repent all their after life.  I have always mistrusted a first love.  One must be quite satisfied that it is for an individual, and not merely the natural inclination for the other sex asserting itself.  Your first love, my poor Eynhardt, certainly belongs to this class.  Your youthful asceticism has had its revenge; now that your reason has got hold of the reins again, the rebellion of your instinct will soon be subdued.”