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Rh her offer, and soon succeeded in winning a respected place in the house of the artist; and she maintained this position by keeping her distance in spite of Kläre's freedom with her. In the course of years Fanny received any number of proposals, mostly from among young sons of manufacturers in the Mariahilf section, with whom she usually danced at balls. But she refused them all, since with unswerving regularity she persisted in falling in love with whoever was Kläre's lover at the time.

For over three years Kläre had been true to Prince Bedenbruck, but with a deeper passion than she had loved his predecessors; and although Leisenbohg had never quite abandoned hope in spite of all his disappointments, he began seriously wondering whether the happiness he had longed for for ten years would never bloom. Always, when he saw someone beginning to slip out of favour, he would take leave of his other darling in order to be prepared at any moment and for all contingencies. He had done the same after the sudden death of Prince Richard; but for the first time it was more through habit than conviction. For Kläre's pain seemed so immoderate, that it was everyone's opinion she would shut herself off now for all time from the joys of this life. Every day she rode out to the cemetery and laid flowers on the grave of the departed. She lost all interest in bright-coloured clothing, and locked up her jewellery in the most out-of-the-way corner of her writing-desk. It required earnest pleading to dissuade her from leaving the stage for ever.

After her first reappearance, which had come off so brilliantly, her external life, at least, took its usual course. The former circle of more removed friends reassembled. The musical critic Bernhard Feuerstein appeared, with either spinach or tomato spots on his vest according to yesterday's bill of fare, and grumbled—much to Kläre's undisguised delight—over colleagues, male and female, and director. As to Lucius and Christian, the two cousins of Prince Richard from the other line of Bedenbrucks, she suffered herself to be courted as formerly in the most uncompromising and respectable style. A gentleman of the French embassy and a young Bohemian virtuoso at the piano were introduced to her, and on the tenth of June she went to the races again for the first time. But as Prince Lucius, who had a turn for poetry, expressed it, only her mind was awake; her heart was still sunk in slumber. Yes, if one of her