time.  She went to his room frequently, but always when he was not at home.  She adorned the doors and walls with everything she had which she knew he loved, and she spent many hours there at work.  She noticed the pallor of his face, which seemed to become greater each time she saw him.  As she was but a mirror of his feelings, his pallor reflected itself in her.  She would have liked to cheer him up, but she did not seek to be near him; her presence seemed to have the opposite effect upon him from what she desired.  He was always friendly and full of chivalrous respect toward her.  This at least comforted her to a certain extent.  She had endowed him with all the virtues that she knew; among these she had not forgotten truthfulness, the first of them all to her.  Therefore she knew that he would not compel himself to show respect to her if he did not feel it.  He made merry sometimes, especially when he saw her eyes fixed anxiously upon his pale face, but she noticed that her society did not make him healthier or more cheerful.  She would have liked to ask him what was the matter.  When he stood before her she did not dare.  When she was alone she asked him.  Many nights through she thought of ways to entice the confession from him and talked with him.  Surely if he had heard her weep, had heard how sweetly and tenderly she cajoled and pleaded, had heard the dear names she gave him, he would have told her what ailed him.  Her whole life was between heart and mouth; and when her heart whispered in her ear what she had said, she flushed rosily and hid her blushes deep beneath the covers from herself and the listening night.

She confided her fears to the old inspector.  “Is it a wonder?” he asked, “when a person sits all day long for a year and a half over his business and all night long over books and letters?  And then all the anxiety he had about his—­God forgive him, he is dead and one should not speak ill of the dead—­about his brother; and then the fright, which made me ill for three days, over—­and when his widow is there too—­I never did like him much, least of all toward the end.  But youth is so!  I warned him a hundred times, the brave fellow!  And now the confounded quarry!  Such conscientiousness!  He is one who would never consider his own health.”  The councilman gave the young widow a long lecture which was not in the least meant for her.  Then they agreed that Apollonius ought to have a doctor whether he wanted him or not; and the councilman immediately went to the best physician in town.  The physician promised to do all that was possible.  He called on Apollonius, who put up with him because those whom he loved desired it.  The doctor felt his pulse, came again and again, prescribed and re-prescribed; Apollonius became ever paler and gloomier.  At last the good man declared that here was a malady against which all art was useless.  So deep-seated was the trouble that no remedy of his could reach it.