and gray eyes, attired in the quaint garb of some early nineteenth-century epoch—­1840 or thereabouts.  As old-fashioned as she looked, a delicate girlish beauty was hers, and when she indifferently gazed at Davos, straightway he heard humming in his head the “glance motive” from Tristan and Isolde.  They passed on, but not leaving him as he was before; a voice whispered in the secret recesses of his being:  “You love!  Follow!  Seek her!” And under the sudden impulsion of this passion he arose and made a few steps toward the curve of the path around which the girl and her companions had disappeared.  The absurdity of this hasty translation into action of his desire halted him.  Yes, his nerves must be in a bad way if a casual encounter with a pretty woman—­but was she pretty?  He did not return to his seat.  He continued his stroll leisurely.  Pretty!  Not exactly pretty—­distinguished!  Noble!  Lovely!  Beautiful!  He smiled.  Here he was playing the praises of the unknown in double octaves.  He did not overtake her.  She had vanished on the other side of the bridge, and in a few minutes he found himself entering Alt-Aussee.  It wore a bright appearance, with its various-coloured villas on the lake shores, and its church and inn for a core.  The garden of this hotel he found to be larger than he had imagined; it stretched along the bank and only stopped as if stone and mortar had been too lazy to go farther.

Again he hesitated.  The garden, the restauration—­full of people:  women knitting, children bawling, men reading; and all sipping coffee to a background of gossip.  He remembered that it was the sacred hour of Kaffeeklatsch, and he would have escaped by a flight of steps that led down to the beach, but he was hailed.  A company of a half-dozen sat at a large table under the trees, and the host was an orchestral conductor well known to Davos.  There was no alternative.  He took a chair.  He was introduced as the celebrated pianoforte-virtuoso to men and women he had never seen before, and hoped—­so rancorous was his mood—­never to see again.  A red-headed girl from Brooklyn, who confessed that she thought Maeterlinck the name of some new Parisian wickedness, further bothered him with questions about piano teachers.  No, he didn’t give lessons!  He never would!  She dropped out of the conversation.  Finally by an effort he swore that his head was splitting, that he must return to Ischl.  He broke away.  When he discovered that the crowd was also bound for the same place, he abruptly disappeared.  It took him just two hours to traverse the irregular curves of the lake on the Franz Carl Promenade, and he ate his dinner in peace at the inn upon a balcony that projected over the icy waters.