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Rh too glad to hold aloof. Graesler spoke of his youth, of the old battlemented, many-spired city of his birth, and of the parental home and ancestral dwelling which waited patiently, year in, year out, to shelter him—and, until a short time ago, his sister as well—for a few short weeks or days of rest in the spring or in autumn. And when Sabine listened to him attentively and not unmoved, he somehow always tried to imagine how beautiful it would be if he were to return home with her and how he would surprise his old friend, the attorney Boehlinger, the only human being who still maintained a certain loose connexion between him and his native city.

And when autumn set in—unusually early and with especial potency—and most of the patients at the health-resort fled before the customary time of departure, and all the hours that he could not spend at The Range were, for Doctor Graesler, empty and desolate, there came over him such a fear of beginning his lonely, meaningless, and hopeless wanderings anew that he sometimes positively thought himself determined to prefer his suit for Sabine in all due form. But instead of putting the question to her point-blank—a thing for which he could not get up the necessary courage—he hit upon the notion (as though this offered a way to seek his counsel straight from fate) of making a general inquiry as to whether Doctor Frank's sanitarium, of which Sabine had recently spoken casually for the second time, were really for sale, and if so, on what terms. As he could get no definite information on the matter, he sought out the proprietor, with whom he was personally acquainted. He found the morose old fellow dressed in a dirty yellow linen suit and sitting on a white bench in front of the sanitarium smoking a pipe, looking much more like an eccentric yokel than like a physician, and asked him straightway whether there was really any foundation for the rumours he had heard. It seemed that Director Frank, too, had only casually betrayed his intentions here and there, and had apparently been expecting, on his part also, something in the nature of a sign of fate. In any case he was thoroughly disposed to be rid of his property, and the sooner the better, as he wished to pass the few years still allotted to him as far removed as possible from real and imaginary patients and to recuperate from the hundreds of thousands of lies to which his profession had all his lifetime condemned him.