For a while he paced about the room in increasing impatience, and in the end he went out to the street. Twilight was approaching. There was no trace of yesterday’s snow. The pavement was wet; there was a penetrating cold in the air; and the wind ploughed through the street, rattling ill-fitting windowpanes and making the shop signs dance. With sheaves of slanting rain lashing intermittently at his face, Gurdweill hurried down the streets, taking no notice of his surroundings. When he crossed the canal, he cast a quick glance at the black, wrinkled water and immediately looked away again, deliberately averting his eyes as if there were something extremely disagreeable about the sight. He even unconsciously quickened his step until he had put the water behind him. His shoulders stooping, his mind a blank, he strode through the labyrinth of the Innere Stadt. Suddenly he found himself in Herrengasse, and he felt a shudder run down his spine. Without turning his head to look at the café, he crossed the road, passed the Burgtheater and the Parliament, and turned into Lerchenfelder Strasse. The city was already steeped in the black of night, broken by the light of the streetlamps. Gurdweill reached Myrthengasse, and turned into it. It was a short, lifeless street, which seemed to have been lifted up and transferred here bodily from some provincial town. In front of number 15, Lotte’s house, he stopped. For a moment he seemed undecided, then he crossed to the other side of the street and fixed his eyes on the second-floor windows. Two of them were lit: the windows of the salon, according to his calculations. For a long time he stood there looking up at the two windows. Once or twice he felt an urge to go up. Lotte must be lying there on the sofa, wrapped in her blue silk kimono with the flowers on it, reading a book. Perhaps even that book by Arthur Merling, no, Lerchner (that damned name, he could never get it right!), which had been lying there a few days before. Perhaps it was even a good book in spite of everything! They would serve tea and little cakes, and a delicate steam would rise from the tea, and the air would be full of the fragrant breezes of a distant early spring, shot through with yearning for something marvellous and undefined, for something that did not exist, and for Lotte too, who was close enough to touch, and for him, himself, too … And as for her telling him that last time to go away, why should that stop him … he wasn’t going to be insulted by something like that! Then, she had been upset — and it was all his fault! But now, now he was coming to put things right! Now, it was already plain as day to him that it was her and only her he had always loved — and she would surely not bear him a grudge because of it! Up to now he had not known his own mind; he had been blind … As long as she didn’t lie there like that, staring at the ceiling … From now on they would always be together, and nothing would ever separate them again …