"Oh, no! I had not decided upon any means of effacing myself; and it was really your arrival which brought on that fainting fit, for if you hadn't turned up when you did I should probably have thought of my interior some time before seven o'clock. But you came. Eugen, I wonder what sent you up to my room just at that very time, on that very day!"
"Von Francius," said Eugen, tranquilly. "I had seen him, and he was very busy and referred me to you--that's all."
"But what's the end of it? Is that the whole story?"
"I thought I might as well help you a bit," said I, rather awkwardly. "You were not like other people, you see--it was the child, I think. I was as much amazed as Karl, if I didn't show it so much, and after that--"
"Well. There was the child, you see, and things seemed quite different somehow. I've been very comfortable" (this was my way of putting it) "ever since, and I am curious to see what the boy will be like in a few years. Shall you make him into a musician too?"
"I don't know," was all he said. Later, I learned the reason of that "don't know."
"So it was no love affair," said Eugen again. "Then I have been wrong all the time. I quite fancied it was some girl--"
"What could make you think so?" I asked, with a whole-hearted laugh. "I tell you I don't know what it is to be in love. The other fellows are always in love. They are in a constant state of _Schwäramerei_ about some girl or other. It goes in epidemics. They have not each a separate passion. The whole lot of them will go mad about one young woman. I can't understand it. I wish I could, for they seem to enjoy it so much."
"You heathen!" said he, but not in a very bantering tone.
"Why, Eugen, do you mean to say that you are so very susceptible? Oh, I beg your pardon," I added, hastily, shocked and confused to find that I had been so nearly overstepping the boundary which I had always marked out for myself. And I stopped abruptly.
"That's like you, Friedhelm," said he, in a tone which was in some way different from his usual one. "I never knew such a ridiculous, chivalrous, punctilious fellow as you are. Tell me something--did you never speculate about me?"
"Never impertinently, I assure you, Eugen," said I, earnestly.