It was eight o'clock; the sun was slanting in the west in a cloudless
splendor, bathing the bright scene in a rich golden glow, and tinging to
bronze the dark masses of the Black Forest. In another hour he was the
expected guest of a Russian Prince at a dinner party, where all that was
highest, fairest, greatest, most powerful, and most bewitching of every
nationality represented there would meet; and in the midst of this
radiant whirlpool of extravagance and pleasure, where every man worth
owning as such was his friend, and every woman whose smile he cared for
welcomed him, he knew himself as utterly alone, as utterly doomed, as
the lifeless Prussian lying in the dead-house. No aid could serve him,
for it would have been but to sink lower yet to ask or to take it; no
power could save him from the ruin which in a few days later at the
farthest would mark him out forever an exiled, beggared, perhaps
dishonored man--a debtor and an alien.
Where he had thrown himself on a bench beneath a mountain-ash, trying
vainly to realize this thing which had come upon him--and to meet which
not training, nor habit, nor a moment's grave reflection had ever done
the slightest to prepare him; gazing, blankly and unconsciously, at the
dense pine woods and rugged glens of the Forest that sloped upward and
around above the green and leafy nest of Baden--he watched mechanically
the toiling passage of a charcoal-burner going up the hillside in
distance through the firs.
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