to-morrow, he would certainly go to the Engadine.

But to-morrow came, and the Herr Doctor looked out of his window as usual, and he did not go to Pontresina or anywhere else, nor the next day, nor the day after. Only up to the Schloss every day through the hot week, with his book and his pipe, and there he would lie and read and smoke, and say to himself, "To-morrow I will certainly go." There was something almost pathetic in Claudius, thus day after day revisiting the scene where he had experienced a momentary sensation of youth and vitality, where he had discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he was still alive and full of strength and sanguine hope, when he thought himself so old. And lying among the ruins he called up the scene again and again, and the strange woman gradually got possession of his mind, as a cunning enchantress might, and she moulded his thoughts about her till they clung to her and burned. He did not seriously think to meet her again in the Schloss, if he thought of it at all, for he knew of course that she must have been a bird of passage, only pausing an instant on that hot day to visit some scene long familiar to her memory. And of course, like a true philosophical student, he did not attempt to explain to himself his own conduct, nor to catalogue the reasons for and against a daily visit to the old castle.

So the week passed, and another after it, and one day, late in the afternoon, Claudius descended the hill and went up as usual to his chamber above the river, to spend an hour indoors before going to supper. It was a beautiful evening, and he left his door partly open on to the landing that the breeze might blow through the room as he sat by the window. A book was in his hand before he had sat many moments, from sheer force of habit; but he did not read. The sounds of the street rose pleasantly to his ear as the little boys and girls played together across each other's doorsteps. To tell the truth, it all seemed very far off, much farther than three flights of steps from the little crowd below to the solitary nest of learning aloft where he sat; and Dr. Claudius was, in his thoughts, incalculably far away from the shoemaker's Hans and the tinman's Gretel and their eight-year-old flirtation. Claudius was flirting with his fancies, and drawing pretty pictures in the smoke, with dark eyes and masses of black hair; and then he moved uneasily, and came back to his threadbare proposition that he was old, and that it was absurd that he should be.

"Ah! what would I not give to enjoy it all—to feel I could wish one moment to remain!" He sighed and leaned back in the 

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