hand; and the afterglow of so much happiness would have left him indifferent to the tediousness and toil of tramping along an even dustier highway than that on which he took his way home.
Nevertheless he thought it proper to let some time pass before again making his appearance at The Range. It was easier for him than he had expected, as his profession began, even inwardly, to occupy him again. He not only treated his patients with the most scrupulous care, but also took pains to fill in as far as possible, by the study of medical works and periodicals, the gaps which had gradually developed in his theoretical knowledge. But even if he was fully conscious that all this was to be traced to the effect upon him of Sabine's personality, he continued, notwithstanding, to defend himself against the rise of any serious hope of possessing the young girl. And even when he let his thoughts play gently over the possibility of a wooing and sought to picture in imagination the outcome of marriage to Sabine, there appeared to him unsummoned the figure—highly disagreeable in this connexion—of the hotel-director in Lanzarote, smiling impertinently as he received the elderly doctor and his young bride at the door of the hotel; and this apparition presented itself to him as regularly as though Lanzarote were the only place in which Graesler could practise his profession during the winter, and the director the only living being who could compromise his budding matrimonial fortunes.
One morning towards the end of the week Graesler met Sabine in town, where she had been attending to some purchases. She asked him why he had not come to see them for such a long time.
"So few people come to visit us," she said, "and it is only to a few of them that you can talk sensibly. Next time you must tell us some more about your life. One likes to get a chance to hear about all that sort of thing." Her eyes shone with a gentle longing.
"If you believe, Fräulein Sabine, that life out there in the world has so many more interesting things to offer, how does it happen that you stay here so quietly?"
"Perhaps it will not always be like this," she replied simply. "And there was once a time when things were a little different. Besides, for the present I can hardly wish for anything better than I have." And the light of longing died out in her eyes.
To be continued
