this time spared him. And though he mourned his sister none the less, there crept into his heart, during the last days of the steamer-trip, a somehow soothing and consolatory feeling of estrangement from the departed who, without so much as a farewell, had left him, wholly unprepared, alone in the world.
II
After a short stay in Berlin, where he brought himself to the attention of a number of clinical professors who were in a position to favour him during the approaching season at the health-resorts, Doctor Graesler arrived on a beautiful May day in the little watering-place, surrounded by woods and hills, in which he had for the past six years been practising his profession during the summer months. He was greeted with cordial sympathy by his landlady, the elderly widow of a merchant, and was pleased at the modest wild-flowers with which she had decorated the dwelling in honour of his arrival. Not without trepidation did he set foot in the little room which his sister had occupied the previous year, but he found himself not so deeply affected as he had really feared. For the rest, life made itself tolerable from the very first. The sky was uniformly clear and soft; the air had the mildness of Spring. And sometimes, for instance when he was at the neatly set breakfast-table on his little balcony and saw there, glistening in the sun, the white, blue-flowered pot—from which, to be sure, he now had to pour his own coffee—there came over him a feeling of contentment such as, at least in latter years, he had not enjoyed in the company of his sister. His other meals he took in an imposing hotel, the best in the town, in the company of several estimable citizens whom he had known before and with whom he could chat without reserve, at times even very entertainingly. His practice, moreover, got under way quite promisingly, and this without unduly burdening his sense of professional responsibility with cases of especial seriousness.
And so the early summer had passed without noteworthy event, when on an evening in July after a rather busy day a messenger, who withdrew as quickly as he had appeared, brought Doctor Graesler a call to The Range, which lay a good hour's drive from the town. The doctor rejoiced little in this turn of affairs; indeed,
