“I hope so,” said Wilhelm.

“I am sure of it.  There is no doubt about the end of crises like these, and it really is difficult to take the misery they cause seriously, although it is bad enough while it lasts.  It is the most overpowering and yet the least dangerous of diseases.  The patient gives himself up for lost, and the doctor can hardly help smiling, because he knows that the malady will only run its course, and will stop like a clock at its appointed time.  He can, however, hasten the cure, if he can bring the patient to his own conviction.”

He was silent, and seemed sunk in thought.  Then he began again suddenly:  “I will read you a story about this; nothing is more instructive than a clinical picture.”

Bhani sprang to her feet and hastened toward him, but he put her aside with a word, and going into his study he appeared again bearing a folio bound in leather and with the corners fastened with copper.

“This is my diary,” he said.  “I have had the weakness to keep this since I was sixteen.  There are three volumes already, and I began the fourth when I returned to Germany.  Listen now, and don’t put yourself under any constraint.  I will laugh with you.”

He opened the folio, and after a short search began to read.  It was the romance of his early life, written in the form of a diary, simply told at some length.  Quite an ordinary story of an acquaintanceship made with a pretty girl, the daughter of a bookseller, who sat next to him in a theater.  Meetings out of doors, then the introduction to her parents’ house, and then the betrothal.  The Revolution of 1848 broke out, and the many demands on the young doctor turned his thoughts away for the time from plans of marriage.  His fiancee greatly admired the fiery orator and fighter at barricades, and told him so, in enthusiastic speeches and letters.  The father, however, had no sympathy with reactionaries, and soon conceived a violent antipathy for his future single-minded son-in-law.  As long as the democratic party held the upperhand, he kept his feelings in the background, making nevertheless endless pretexts for delaying the marriage.  The party of reactionaries broke up, however, and the bookseller declared war; he forbade the young democrat to enter his house, and even denounced him to the police.  The young lovers were, of course, dreadfully unhappy, and vowed to be true to one another.  He determined to go away, and tried to persuade her to go with him.  She was frightened, but he was audacious and insisted.  They would go to London, and be married there; he could earn his living, and they would defy the father’s curse.  All was arranged; but at the last moment her courage failed, and she confessed all to the tyrant, who set the police on the young man’s track, and sent the girl away to relations in Brandenburg.  The unfortunate lover’s letters were unanswered.  He left Germany, and heard after some weeks that his betrothed was married to a well-to-do jeweler, apparently without any great coercion.