It was long after eleven when the concert was over and the party started
on its homeward trip. Krayne and Röselein walked behind the others, and
soon the darkness and the narrowness of the road forced him to tread
after the girl. The moon's rays at intervals pierced the foliage,
making lacelike patches of light in the gloom. At times they skirted the
edges of a circular clearing and saw the high pines fringing the
southern horizon; overhead the heavens were almost black, except where
great streams of stars swept in irregular bands. It was a glorious
sight, Krayne told Röselein--too sublime to be distracted by mere mortal
love-making, he mentally added. Nevertheless he was glad when they were
again in the woods; he could barely distinguish the girl ahead of him,
but her outline made his heart beat faster. Once, as they neared the
town, he helped her down a declivity into the roadway, and he could not
help squeezing her hand. The pressure was returned. He boldly placed her
arm within his, and they at last reached the streets, but not before,
panting with mingled fright and emotion, he solemnly kissed her. She did
not appear surprised.

"Call me Rösie--thou!" she murmured, and her naïveté brought the ready
tears to his eyes. They made a rendezvous for the next morning on the
Promenade Platz. The only thing he did not like was the scowling face of
the dancer when he said good night to the others under the electric
lights of the Kreuzbrunnen. He was correct, then, in his premonition.

That night Hugh Krayne dreamed he was a very skeleton for thinness--not
an unusual vision of fat men--and also a Tyrolean yodler, displaying
himself before a huge audience of gigantic human beings, who laughed so
loudly that he could not open his lips to frame the familiar words of
his song. In the despair of a frantic nightmare, his face streaming with
anguished tears, he forced his voice:--