But one morning, just at dawn, the woman of that sorrowful name and dolorous life passed away into her rest, while she slept.  And when ’Tista, with his heart almost breaking for grief, came at the hour of sunrise to tell Herr Ritter that she was dead, the old man looked out across the hazy blue of the eastern reaches at the sea of golden splendour breaking beyond them, and answered only in his quiet patient way, that he had known it could not be for long.

I heard the words and understood them, but to the boy they meant nothing.

Then there came a night when the shelves stood empty, save for the skull and the fossils, and Herr Ritter wore a strange luminous aspect upon his placid face, that was not of the shadows nor of the lights of earth.  For five days he had broken no bread, and his strength had failed him for want and for age, and no friend had been to visit him.  ’Tista, I suppose, had his business now, and of late his presence in the dark studio had become more and more rare; not that he was unkind, but that he was full of youth, and the vigorous love of youth; and the old man’s talk was wearisome to ears that delighted in sounds of laughter and frolic.  And besides all this, he did not know how much he owed to the old philosopher, for Herr Ritter still kept silence.

All the autumn day had been sultry, and the wind seemed to have fallen asleep in some remote corner of the sky, for there had scarce been air enough to stir the feathery tassels of the pasture grasses, and the stillness of drought and heat had been everywhere unbroken.

But when I looked towards the west at sundown, I saw that all the long low horizon was shrouded in twirling cumuli, with tops of lurid flame; and great shafts of red tempestuous light, shot upward from the dying sun, launched themselves over the heavens, and hung there like fiery swords above a city of doom.

Herr Ritter sat up late that night, reading a packet of old worn-looking letters, which he had taken out of a small wooden box beneath his bed; and as he read them, burning them to tinder one by one in the flame of his lamp.  A little torn morsel of a note, yellow with age, and half charred with the smoke of the destruction it had escaped, fluttered down from the table through the open casement, and fell in the balcony by my side.  There were words on the paper, written in stiff German characters, orthodox and methodical in every turn and upstroke and formal pothook.  They were these:—­

“I distinctly refuse to give my daughter in marriage to a man who is so great a fool as to throw away his chances of wealth and fame for the sake of a mere whim.  Yesterday you thought fit to decline a Professorship which was offered you, on account of a condition being attached to your acceptance of it.  You fancied you could not honestly fulfil that condition, and you lost your promotion.  Very well:  you have also lost my daughter.  I see plainly that you will never be rich, for you will never get on in the world, and no child of mine shall be wife to you.  Consider your engagement with her at an end.”