Much moved, and not yet in a condition to arrange the thoughts which poured in on him in thousands, Klaus Heinrich remained behind in his homely Empire room.
He passed a restless night, and went next morning, despite misty and damp weather, for a long and lonely ride. Herr von Knobelsdorff had talked clearly and voluminously, had given and accepted facts; but for the fusion, modelling, and working up of these multifarious raw products he had given only curt, aphoristic instructions, and Klaus Heinrich found himself doomed to some heavy thinking while he lay awake at night, and later when he went for a ride on Florian.
When he got back to the "Hermitage" he did a remarkable thing. He wrote with a pencil on a piece of paper an order, a certain commission, and sent Neumann, the valet, with it to the Academy Bookshop in the University Strasse: Neumann came back with a package of books, which Klaus Heinrich had set out in his room, and which he began at once to read.
They were works of a sober and school-bookish appearance, with glazed paper backs, ugly leather sides, and coarse paper, and the contents were divided up minutely into sections, main divisions, sub-divisions, and paragraphs. Their titles were not stimulating. They were manuals and hand-books of economy, abstracts and outlines of State finance, systematic treatises on political economy. The Prince shut himself up in his study with these books, and gave instructions that he wished on no account to be disturbed.
The autumn was damp, and Klaus Heinrich felt little tempted to leave the "Hermitage." On Saturday he drove to the Old Schloss to give free audiences: otherwise his time was his own all this week, and he knew how to make use of it. Wrapped in his dressing-gown, he sat in the warmth of the low stove at his small, old-fashioned,
