students. With the girl in the pictures, the wild imagination of Lottchen,
probably in part from her apparently absolute unattainableness and her
undisputed heartlessness, had fallen in love, as far as the mere
imagination can fall in love.

"But again, how was he to see her? He haunted the house night after night.
Those blue eyes never met his. No step responsive to his came from that
door. It seemed to have been so long unopened that it had grown as fixed
and hard as the stones that held its bolts in their passive clasp. He
dared not watch in the daytime, and with all his watching at night, he
never saw father or daughter or domestic cross the threshold. Little he
thought that, from a shot-window near the door, a pair of blue eyes, like
Lilith's, but paler and colder, were watching him just as a spider watches
the fly that is likely ere long to fall into his toils. And into those
toils Karl soon fell. For her form darkened the page; her form stood on
the threshold of sleep; and when, overcome with watching, he did enter its
precincts, her form entered with him, and walked by his side. He must find
her; or the world might go to the bottomless pit for him. But how?

"Yes. He would be a painter. Teufelsbuerst would receive him as a humble
apprentice. He would grind his colours, and Teufelsbuerst would teach him
the mysteries of the science which is the handmaiden of art. Then he might
see _her_, and that was all his ambition.

"In the clear morning light of a day in autumn, when the leaves were
beginning to fall seared from the hand of that Death which has his dance
in the chapels of nature as well as in the cathedral aisles of men--he
walked up and knocked at the dingy door. The spider painter opened it
himself. He was a little man, meagre and pallid, with those faded blue
eyes, a low nose in three distinct divisions, and thin, curveless, cruel