Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/34

10 "Good night, Doctor," she said gravely.

"Good night, Fräulein," he replied, and climbed into the carriage.

Sabine stood there for a moment until the carriage had got under way; then she turned to go. Doctor Graesler looked back after her. Head slightly bowed and without turning around, she walked up through the pines and towards the house from which a beam of light shimmered along the path. A bend in the road, and the picture had vanished. The doctor leaned back and gazed up at the sky, which hung above him in the cool dusk, sparsely studded with stars.

He thought of distant times, of younger, happier days, when many a pretty creature had been bound to him by love. First there came to him the widow of the engineer from Rio de Janeiro; in Lisbon she had left the steamer on which he was, in his capacity as ship's-doctor, her fellow-traveller—had left it, ostensibly in order to make some purchases in the city, and, in spite of the fact that her ticket was good to Hamburg, had not returned on board. He saw her still before him, dressed in black—saw her as she nodded to him pleasantly from the carriage which was conveying her up to the city from the harbour—saw her as, at a street-corner, she vanished from his sight for ever. He further called to mind the lawyer's daughter from Nancy, to whom he had become engaged in St Blasien, the first watering-place in which he had ever practised, and who had then to make a sudden trip to France with her parents because of an important law-suit and had left him to that very day without advice of her safe arrival at home, without word of any kind. His mind also went back to Fräulein Lizzie and his student days in Berlin; she had gone so far as to shoot herself, somewhat, on his account, and he remembered how she had reluctantly shown him the smoke-blackened wound under her left breast, and how he had nevertheless been quite unmoved by this and had, indeed, been sensible rather of a certain vexation and of a feeling of ennui. Nice, domestic little Henriette he recalled, too; for many years, whenever he had returned to Hamburg from his ocean trips, he had found her in her tiny dwelling overlooking the Alster—found her as cheerful, as unruffled, as available, as when he had last left her, and this without his ever learning, or at all seriously bothering himself about, what in the interval she had been doing or feeling. Divers other affairs crossed his mind as well, among them several