overcome by a fearsome reluctance at the possibility of having to read it again, he locked it up in a drawer.
The following morning he asked himself how in the world he would pass that day and the succeeding ones. He had long since become a stranger to his own native city; most of his friends had died off, and his connexions with the few surviving ones had gradually become slack or been broken off altogether; only his sister had been wont again and again to employ her occasional presence in the town to visit various extremely old people who had belonged to the circle of acquaintances of her long since departed parents. Graesler therefore had, as a matter of fact, no other business to attend to at home than the conference with his old friend, the attorney Boehlinger—a business which did not seem pressing.
Upon leaving his house he first took a walk through the city, as he had a habit of doing when he returned again, after a long absence, for a short stay at home. In these wanderings a certain faint and almost salutary emotion usually had a way of coming over him, but that day, beneath the heavy, grey, rainy sky, such an emotion was completely wanting. Somewhat apathetically he passed the house where, from a narrow, high corner window a sweetheart of his youth had furtively beckoned to, and smiled at, the school-boy on his way to and from school; indifferently he heard the rippling of the fountain in the autumn-clad park, which he himself had seen develop slowly in the old town moats; and when he stepped from the court of the famous old town-hall, and around the corner, in a narrow, hidden lane, saw the ancient, almost dilapidated little house where, behind half opaque windows, easily identified by their red curtains, he had had his first miserable adventure followed by weeks of terror, he had a sensation as of seeing torn and dusty veils lifting themselves from his whole boyhood.
The first person to whom he spoke was the white-bearded tobacconist in the store in which he was accustomed to supply himself with cigars. When this individual expressed to him somewhat profusely his condolences on the death of his sister, Graesler hardly knew what to reply, and was afraid of meeting still more acquaintances and of having to listen to further, similar, meaningless words. But the next one he met did not recognize him, and a third, who made a move to stop, he himself passed by with a hurried, almost impolite greeting.
