Friedrich Othmar shrugged his shoulders.
'It is not always a fool,' he made answer; 'but it is, I think, always an ingrate.'
Was he himself an ingrate? Or did he only suffer from that inevitable law of recoil and rebound which governs human life; that cessation of tension which makes a great passion, once satisfied and become familiar, like a bow unstrung?
There is always a pathetic reaction, a curious sense of loss in the midst of possession, which follows on the attainment of every great desire. If anyone had told him that he was not perfectly happy, he would have indignantly denied the accuracy of their assertion. Whenever any misgiving that he was not so arose in his own mind, he repulsed it with contempt as the mere ungrateful rebelliousness of human nature. Yet now and then a vague sense that his life was not much more perfect than it had been before the desires of his heart had been given to him, occasionally came over him, though he always thrust it away.
She herself felt sometimes an almost irresistible inclination to say to him: 'And you, you who set your soul on marriage with me, have
