"Where?" I asked at once, for my heart was beating furiously.
"Perhaps you remember a little street—Seilergasse."
"Seilergasse!" I repeated, and stared at him.
He smiled.
"Perhaps you also lived there? What a funny coincidence!"
"No, I did not exactly live there, but I went there very often. I knew a family there."
"I see! Well, well.… In these little streets everybody knows one another. Perhaps you have by chance heard about the people with whom I lodged; the landlord was a teacher at a public school."
"Jagemann?" I exclaimed.
The musician just raised a full glass to his lips, and spilt it so that the golden drops ran down the lapel of his coat.
"Yes, it was with them I lived," he said, and wiped himself carefully.
I now knew who my companion was. It was her first, half-childish love, the musician to whom Stephensen had seen her give the farewell kiss.
"And it was those people I used to visit," I said; "at least—Jagemann was dead—it was madam and the daughter I went to see."
"Minna—she was a lovely girl!"
We both stared down our glasses, as if we, with Heine, saw everything there—
"But most of all the face of my loved one,
That angel-head on the Rhenish wine's gold ground."
"Do you know if she—Minna Jagemann—whether she since has got married?" he asked at last.
I told him that she had married a Danish painter, made
