“I am to tell her this”—­asked Herr Ritter, recovering himself with a prodigious effort “from you?”

“As you please,” returned the great lady, still in the same indifferent tone.  “It will be useless for her to call here, I cannot see her; and besides, I leave tomorrow with my husband.”

Again she bowed her head, and this time Herr Ritter obeyed the signal.  I felt his great liberal heart heaving,—­thump, thump, under the lapel of the old rusty coat; but I breathed my spirit into his face, and he said no more as he turned away than just a formal “Buon giorno, Signora.”

“Silence is best,” I whispered.

Chapter III.

He went home to his little dark studio, where the sunlight so rarely entered, and where the big tomes and the skull and the fossils, and the picture of the beautiful girl and her crimson roses, greeted him with unchanged looks.  All the room was pervaded with the aroma of the belladonna plant in the balcony, and all the soul of the old philosopher was filled with an atmosphere of silent liberality.

He stood before the bookshelves and laid his withered fingers falteringly upon the volumes, one after another.  I knew already what was passing in his heart, and my rising perfume assisted the noble sacrifice.  Then he lifted the books from their places,—­one, two, three,—­the volumes he prized the most, ancient classical editions that must have been an El Dorado of themselves to such a student and connoisseur as he.  For a moment he lingered over the open pages with a loving, tremulous tenderness of look and touch, as though they had been faces of dear and life-long friends; then he turned and looked at the picture in the dark corner.  A name rose to his lips; a soft-sounding German diminutive, but I hardly heard it for the exceeding bitterness of the sigh that caught and drowned the muttered utterance.  But I knew that in that moment his liberal heart renounced a double sweetness, for surely he had cherished the gift of a dead love no less than he had treasured the noble work of immortal genius.

Then, with his books under his arm, he went silently out of the studio, and back again into the town, along many a dingy winding court, avoiding the open squares and the market-place, until we came to a tall dark-looking house in a narrow street.  There Herr Ritter paused and entered, passing through along vestibule into a spacious apartment at the back of the house, where there was a gentleman lounging in an easy attitude over the back of an armchair, from which he seemed to have just risen, and slashing with an ivory paper-knife the leaves of a book he was holding.  The room in which we found ourselves had a curiously hybrid appearance, and I could not determine whether it were, indeed, part of a publisher’s warehouse, or of a literary museum, or only the rather expansive sanctum of an opulent homme de lettres.