The mottled golden tops of the chestnuts grew paler, the gaps ever wider that the autumn ate into the foliage. Where a soothing green had cut off the view, now glittered the bright wavelets of the canal. Long barges, laboriously pushed by poles, trailed along in their cumbersome fashion, and the shaggy watchdogs barked up at the aristocratic windows.

Grey, rainy days came stealing upon the city like an enemy, and loneliness laid its octopus clutch on Lilly's breast.

But her work! Yes, she had her work. So long as the first infatuation had lasted and Lilly felt she might hope for some realisation of her plans, she had clung to her work day and night.

But the hoped-for turn of events never came. The announcements she had had printed remained unheeded. Mr. Dehnicke, sole purchaser of her goods, begged her—with a hesitating, embarrassed manner, to be sure, yet explicitly enough—not to be hasty, since the general state of the market was dull.

By degrees her zest in her profession began to languish. She gave up going to Mr. Kellermann for lessons, especially since his insistence upon setting free his "chained beauty" grew steadily more annoying. She locked the half-filled sample closets and completed none but the pieces Mr. Dehnicke ordered.

Oh, those dark, pitiless days, which no laughter brightened, no waiting shortened, and no purpose bound together.

The kitchen was ruled by a young maid, ever silent, whose eyes were greedy and too knowing. Each morning, while the little canary peeped, the fish were given fresh water.

It was somewhat better in the evening when the lights were lit and the crystal chandelier radiated a brilliant white light. Lilly would then wander from room to room changing the position of this or that ornament and constantly reassuring herself how beautifully she lived and how happy she was.

But of what avail was the old rose carpet with its vague vine pattern, the wine-coloured furniture, and the bronze bodies looking as if a golden breath had blown over them? Those bronze bodies whose innermost being after all was nothing more than a zinc alloy, having originated in the factory of Liebert & Dehnicke. Of what avail the charming secrÉtaire and the writing paper with the golden coronet stamped on it, of which Mr. Dehnicke had immediately ordered five hundred sheets? There was nobody to rejoice with her, nobody whom her longing brought to her side.

She would often seat herself at the piano and let her fingers stray over the keys. But she did not get the pleasure out of playing that she had anticipated. Her father's discipline had long lost its effects. She had forgotten the pieces she had once known by heart, and she lacked the calm and patience to learn all over again.

Yes, it was strange what disquiet would seize her the instant she touched the keys, a feeling of dread, an anticipation of impending danger, a consciousness of her own unworthiness.

She could not keep on; she had to shut down the lid and take to wandering again from room to room until her legs wearied and ten o'clock summoned her to bed.

In those joyless, unoccupied days, a piercing, stinging desire for man awoke in her, causing her nerves to tingle and a sweet, tormenting shudder to thrill her body.

The whole of the two long years her senses had been mute. Tears of regret had drowned that which the colonel's senile depravity had enkindled, and the weeks of love with Walter von Prell had fanned into lively flames. Drowned it forever, it seemed. But there it stood again, transporting and shaming and refusing to be silenced by prayers or reproach.

Often she felt she would have to run out on the street just to catch the glance of any stranger—as in the Dresden days—and see desire flare up in eyes veiled with yearning.

But the people she might encounter on the street were rough and common. The mere thought of them made her tremble.

The only time she went out was to visit her former landlady.

The walk lasted a full hour, and before she had reached her former home, many a naÏve admirer, many a keen boulevardier, had bobbed up beside her and tried to enter into a pleasant conversation. She always ran to the other side of the street, shaking herself. Sometimes, yes, sometimes, she would have liked to reply.

When she lay in bed with closed eyes, she dreamed of strong-willed, sharply cut men's faces, to which she looked up in yielding happiness.

She often dreamed, too, of Mr. Dehnicke, good, sound, loyal Mr. Dehnicke.

If he were to come to her some day and falter in that guilty way of his which she liked so well: "I love you inordinately, and want you to marry me," what would she say to him?

Each time she thought this a furtive sense of comfort stole over her.

As for the man who by full right stood closest to her, she never dreamed of him. Sometimes, it is true, when her longings did not know where to strike root, those anxious yet blissful November nights would recur to her. But the part of hero might have been played by any other man as well as Walter.

Walter himself had grown to be a sort of tyrannical conscience with her.

She loved him—of course! How could she help loving him? He was her "betrothed," and he was working for her. But sometimes, when she stood in front of the sofa and felt his cold, blue eyes resting upon her haughtily and masterfully, and she recalled the sorry, inconstant little fellow he actually had been, she felt a desire to shake off everything that came from him and held her under a spell, as one tries to rid oneself of a preposterous nightmare.

If only Mr. Dehnicke had not kept alluding to him with so much devotion and respect, treating himself as the modest agent, who would have to render account to his dear friend, when that dear friend would return in honour and glory.

Mr. Dehnicke came punctually twice a week to inquire after her health and drink tea. He would leave in time to reach his office before it was closed for the day. These scant hours were always a festival for her.

What wonder? She had no one beside him. He was the only person who bound her to the rest of the world and brought incident and interest into her life.

She spent hours in fixing up the tea table, in trying different ways of lighting the room, in arranging the flowers, and standing before the mirror—for him.

When he came at last and sat opposite her, they conversed long and seriously about the cares that oppressed him, the plans he was revolving in his mind, his disgust at the artists who considered it a disgrace to work for the trade, and did so only if the pistol was held to their heads, and then disdainfully, clenching their teeth; his trashy competitors, who built palaces in order to throw dust in the eyes of the buyers, and who thereby had forced him to transform his good old business place in accordance with modern ideas of decoration.

Most distressing of all was his clientele. The artistic ideals of the metropolis in a measure made a moral demand upon him to go over to the secession and place on the market long-necked, narrow-hipped bodies in distorted attitudes. The real public, however, the well-intentioned public with purchasing power, would have nothing to do with all that rubbish. It clung to knights and high-born dames, to maidens plucking flowers or carrying water, to fighting stags and swinging monkeys. So he stood between the devil and the deep sea. On the one hand was the danger that people would ridicule him as old-fashioned, on the other hand, the danger of losing most of his old hereditary customers. So he had to steer carefully along a middle course, and that was extremely difficult.

He also spoke frequently of the factory, with its hundreds of industrious hands, who laboured day after day for the prosperity of the house; and of the alterations being made in his yard and sample room, which, to judge by the architect's plans and the sum he calculated they would cost, would produce something worth seeing.

But what doesn't competition force a man to do?

Lilly listened with shining eyes.

She shared in all his activities. She wanted to see everything and experience it with him, not only the renovation of the sample room, but also the doings in the factory with its machines, its clatter of wheels, its hissing of flames, and screeching of files. She never wearied of questioning. She had to know how the workmen looked and behaved, their wages, their lot in life, and what became of them. She felt that there in his factory was real existence, while her life was nothing but a dull, idle waking dream.

"Oh, how happy you must be," she often cried out admiringly, "to have so many souls in your keeping!"

"If the whole bunch of them didn't keep you in a stew all the time," he rejoined.

But she would not admit the qualification.

He was certainly a beneficent god to them all, she said, even if he did not feel it himself. He must be, because of his power and his good heart.

Mr. Dehnicke gladly listened to such expressions. While she was speaking he would jump up abruptly, as if seized by a mighty, revolutionary idea, pace up and down the room excitedly, then stop in front of her and stare down at her with a dark solicitous look in his eyes, apparently unable to reach some great decision against which he was struggling.

Lilly pretended not to notice his behaviour, though she knew exactly what was fermenting in his soul.

"Let him alone, don't help him," she thought. "He must do whatever he wants to do of his own impulse. Otherwise he will bear me a grudge."

If only there hadn't been that hateful sense of duty toward Walter, which, like herself, Mr. Dehnicke probably felt only in part, and shammed as a matter of decorum.

There was something else that gave her qualms. Although he had promised to, he had never fulfilled the wish she had expressed to see his factory.

However, he spoke openly of his mother, and did not shrink from confessing how greatly she had influenced him, though Lilly could read into his words that he wished for more freedom to develop his powers. When his father had died twelve years before, he had been a minor, and had had to yield to his mother's guidance. The old lady continued to maintain her authority. Dehnicke discussed each undertaking with her, and if she approved, it was executed, even if he did not concur.

Lilly felt a dull terror arise within her of that old lady who sat commandingly in her arm-chair behind those respectable porcelain flower pots, and directed the conduct of so powerful a man as Lilly's benefactor.

Her heart would contract when she imagined her first meeting with the old lady.

Before Christmas Lilly had more work to do. Two dozen transparencies had been ordered and had to be completed before the holidays. 24x30=720. Well, she could see ahead again.

For the first time in four years she forgot to send her mother a Christmas gift. To compensate, she made a particularly "poetic" lamp shade and had it delivered anonymously to Mr. Dehnicke's mother the day before Christmas. She herself did not know why she did this. Perhaps it was a sort of propitiatory offering, such as timid souls were wont to sacrifice to unknown gods as an expiation for unknown sins.

Counting upon her friend's coming, though by no means certain he would, she had made a little heap of her gifts for him, and at the fall of dusk with throbbing heart began to listen for the ring of the door bell.

Her fears were idle. At half past five he appeared loaded with parcels. He had displayed tact in his choice of the simple presents—things she still needed in the apartment, a few embroidered collars, a boa, because she had to be careful of her sables, and a few little pieces from his factory to adorn the empty top of her secrÉtaire. At each of her exclamations of delight he protested mildly. The things really came from Walter, as she knew.

"And what comes from you?" she asked.

"Nothing," he replied, turning his palms upward.

"I know of something you could give me that Walter has nothing to do with."

"What's that?"

"Show me your factory."

This time he did not evade her request. A date was immediately set—the first workday after New Year, when everything would be in running order again.

Then Mr. Dehnicke added with an embarrassed air:

"But please wear something dark and simple."

"Why?" asked Lilly, frightened. "Do I usually dress conspicuously?" She felt as if some one had boxed her ears.

"Oh, not that. But your good clothes might be soiled."

On January the second at about noon Lilly stood in front of the house in Alte Jakobstrasse, which she had not seen since she had paid Mr. Dehnicke that memorable first visit in his office.

"It has almost turned out to be a path of destiny after all," she thought, and looked up furtively at the porcelain flower pots in the second story windows. She started. It seemed to her a white head had moved behind the lace curtains.

"That smacks of a guilty conscience," she thought, and with awed, sidelong glances walked past the door that opened upon the broad, laurel-lined staircase which her unworthy feet might never tread until she had been received into the circle of bourgeois virtue.

But the carriage gate stood hospitably open. The scaffolding had been removed, and the imitation marble of walls and columns shone challengingly in their variegated colours. The magnificence of the courtyard beyond oppressed her heart again.

The office building had also undergone changes. The dun-coloured plaster had given place to a broad sandstone faÇade adorned by the busts of eminent artists; and gilded railings gleamed where once the sorry-looking iron staircase had been.

There was her friend hurrying down the steps to meet her.

Despite the stinging cold he wore no hat. In holding out his hand to her he cast a furtive look of scrutiny at all the windows. It seemed he, too, had a guilty conscience.

He first led her to the sample room. Its brand-new magnificence exceeded her boldest expectations. Columned halls with coffered ceilings stretched out in a long vista as in a museum. There were endless rows of tables and cases, on which, gleaming with gold and silver lights, sparkling with crystal prisms, glowing with the hot red of copper, or shading off softly into the light green of the patina, stood thousands of works of German art and industry, "imitation bronzes," destined to fill the show windows of shops and carry the semblance of display-loving prosperity into the huts of the poor.

There were corpulent begging friars, dancing gypsy girls clad in boleros, ogling dandies, postillions blowing horns, pecking chickens, dogs fetching game, calenders set in horse-shoe frames, cigar clips in the shape of little champagne bottles; tall pelicans holding lamps in their bills; figurines of men and women stretching up their arms, just as in Mr. Kellermann's studio, though here not aimlessly, since they bore aloft vases, candelabra and bowls. There were arbours screening love couples, with red electric bulbs hidden in the foliage; brownies beside shining mushrooms, sea shells to serve as ash trays, snakes writhing about the chalices of flowers, or about porcelain eggs, or copper dice. The whole pitifulness of a vulgar sense of art seemed to have crept into this glittering conglomeration and been concentrated there ready to scatter to all quarters of the globe.

When Lilly gave her friend a questioning or astonished look because of some monstrosity, he shrugged his shoulders and observed:

"That's what the people want."

Despite some dissatisfaction with what she saw Lilly could have walked up and down for hours amid all that sparkle. She felt she belonged there by right. Had she been asked for her opinion she would have said without a moment's reflection: "Throw this away, and this, and this." But nobody appealed to her judgment, and everything went its way without her.

Mr. Dehnicke then took her to the factory.

Unfortunately the foundry, in which the basic part of all the work is done, happened just then to be closed. Through an open window Lilly saw the black gaping depths of the hearths, about which dirty troughs were standing, and over all, over chimney-hoods and vessels, a thick layer of ashes.

They descended a flight of dirty steps and passed through damp rooms smelling of all sorts of poisons, where rows of mighty vats stood filled with vile fluids, and elderly men bustled about, who looked like sombre scholars, whereas they were nothing more than mere labourers. At Lilly's entrance they cast a look of surprise at her then concerned themselves about her no further. And they did not greet their employer.

"This is the galvanising room," explained Mr. Dehnicke, and continued as they walked past the vats, "The nickle bath, steel bath, silver bath, and so on."

Up in a loft surrounded by an iron netting, the wheels of a machine whirled, and vari-coloured electric bulbs glittered among them.

"That's where the electric current is generated which goes through the different baths."

Lilly did not understand, but she enjoyed the inconceivable rapidity with which the wheels span around and the buzzing sound they made.

In the room where the chasing was done many men stood at long tables industriously at work smoothing down the unevennesses of the cast metal, and preparing the separate parts of an ornament for joining. The joining was done in the next room, where the flames of the blowpipes darted and hissed and little clouds of metallic vapour shot sparks into the air. At each workman's place lay small heaps of burnished limbs, which made one feel sorry for the truncated body from which they seemed to have been severed.

In the next room the thinner parts were beaten into shape in iron dies. It was here that the flowers and foliage were made, the ribbons and vines and arabesques, everything that curled and dangled daintily. The workingmen looked all the coarser and unwieldier by contrast. They scarcely glanced up when Lilly and Mr. Dehnicke entered, and continued to hammer as if stupefied into dealing those blows.

Lilly had a keener eye for the appearance and bearing of the men than for the work they turned out. She made comparisons, decided who was well off and who in distress, who took pleasure in his work and who went through the day's toil doggedly, because driven to it by need. Each shop had its peculiar physiognomy. In one the majority looked fresh and agile, in another galled and weary.

And now, as often before when Mr. Dehnicke had spoken to her of his employÉs, a senseless desire arose in Lilly to watch over the fate of all these people, help where help was necessary, bring sunshine to the gloomy, and relief to the suffering. But she took good care not to acquaint Mr. Dehnicke with her absurd ideas.

"Now we will see the most delicate of all the operations," said Mr. Dehnicke. "It is putting on the patina, which gives the pieces their real style."

He opened the door to the next shop, and the smell of a thousand poisons again assailed Lilly's nostrils.

Here there were women at work also, side by side with the men. They applied varnish and acids and brushed and rubbed. They looked sallow and jaded. At Lilly's entrance they were so taken aback that they dropped their brushes and cloths and stared at her in utter astonishment.

"One would have to begin with these to win the confidence of all," Lilly thought, and gave them a cordial nod.

But they seemed to take her greeting as mockery or blame, and turned back to their work with a grimace well-nigh scornful.

In the packing room, where women and children were employed exclusively, Lilly's appearance produced a happier impression. The girls laughed and whispered, and nudged one another with their elbows.

The only one who paid no attention to her was a pregnant woman, who seemed to find it difficult to keep from sinking to the floor. She held her drooping lips tightly compressed and a vivid red spotted her cheeks. Nevertheless her arms moved in feverish haste wrapping one paper wisp after the other about the limbs of the figure standing on the table in front of her, and inclining now to the right, now to the left under her manipulations.

Lilly led Mr. Dehnicke aside and asked:

"May I give her something?"

"She's being provided for," he replied, unpleasantly affected, it seemed. He quickly opened another door.

"This leads to the store room, where the pieces are kept until sold, with the exception, of course, of those which are made to order."

Lilly looked down a dimly lighted corridor, from which the cold air blew upon her. On the shelves and stands stood endless rows of phantom beings, shapeless in their grey paper envelopes.

"Oh, how queer," said Lilly, shivering a little, and preparing to walk along the narrow passageway. The very same instant, however, she noticed her friend start as in fright, and cast a helpless look about him. Then he stepped in front of her and blocked the way.

"What's the matter?" asked Lilly, surprised.

He turned colour and said:

"We had better not go in there. We'll go somewhere else. Besides, there's nothing to look at there, not a thing. You yourself see there isn't."

He planted himself squarely in front of her, so that she could not possibly look down the long line of shelves.

This, of course, merely heightened her curiosity.

"But I would like to," she said, and assumed the over-bearing, haughty expression with which she was wont to get her way with him.

"No, no," he burst out hastily. "It's a business secret. I mayn't betray it to a soul. Even the employÉs are not allowed to come here. Really I can't permit it."

"Then you shouldn't have brought me here at all," said Lilly, feeling insulted; and she turned back.

He poured forth excuses, grew hoarse with excitement, and coughed and choked. Then he led her back over the resplendent mosaic of the yard to the gateway with its imitation marble columns, through which a chilly draught was blowing.

"You will catch a cold," said Lilly to hasten her departure.

His face lighted up with a brilliant idea.

"Besides, you know," he said, "the store room wasn't heated."

"You should have thought of that sooner," rejoined Lilly, holding out her hand with a smile of partial reconciliation. She was really sorry for him in his helpless solicitude.

Nevertheless she continued to feel hurt. And a bit disturbed. The day she had been looking forward to so happily for months had ended in a discord.

And no matter how much she pressed him later, Mr. Dehnicke refused to tell her what mystery lay concealed in his store room.