Fritz Nettenmair accompanied the workman a part of his way.  The workman wanted to walk faster, so he thanked him for his company, intending to proceed alone.  When others part their last words are of what they both love; Fritz Nettenmair’s and the workman’s last words were of their hatred.  The workman knew that Apollonius would have liked to have put him in the penitentiary, if he could.  As the two now stood facing each other at parting, the workman measured the other with his eye.  It was an evil, lurking glance, a grimly surreptitious glance that asked Fritz Nettenmair, without intending to be heard, whether he was ready for something which the workman did not name.  Then he said, in a hoarse voice which would have struck the other but that Fritz Nettenmair was accustomed to it:  “What was it I wanted to say?  Oh, yes, you will soon be in mourning.  I saw him the other day.”  He did not need to mention any name, Fritz Nettenmair knew whom he meant.  “There are people who see more than others,” the workman continued, “there are people who can see in a slater’s face if he is doomed to fall that year, who see him being carried home, and see him lying there, only he is not there any more.  An old slater told me the secret of how to see with the ‘second sight.’  I have it.  And now farewell.  Meet it with resignation when they carry him home.”

The workman had left him; his steps were already growing faint in the distance.  Fritz Nettenmair still stood and gazed into the white-gray fog into which the workman had disappeared.  The layers of fog hung horizontally above the meadows by the street spread out like a cloth.  They rose and melted together, forming strange shapes, they curled, floated apart and sank down again only to rear themselves once more.  They hung on the branches of the willows by the way, now veiling them, now leaving them free, till it seemed uncertain whether the fog was dissolving into trees or the trees into fog.  It was a dreamlike activity, untiring movement without aim or purpose.  It was a picture of what was going on in Fritz Nettenmair’s soul, such a true picture that he did not know whether he was looking at something outside or something within himself.  There came a hazy bending down and wringing of hands about a pale figure on the ground, then a slowly moving funeral procession, and now it was his enemy, his brother who lay there, whom they carried.  Now malicious joy flamed up sharply, died down and pity took its place, now both were mixed and one tried to hide the other.  The figure lying there, whom they carried, Fritz forgave everything.  He wept over him; for in the intervals of the funeral song the merry dance-tune sounded softly which the future struck up:  “There he comes!  Now the fun will begin!” And beside the dead lay a second corpse, invisible, his fear of what must come if his poor brother did not lie dead.  And in the coffin, Fritz Nettenmair’s old jovial happiness put forth new buds.  Fritz Nettenmair felt himself to be an angel; he wished that his brother need not die, because—­he knew that his brother must die.