He was the first to break the silence. “So you were telling me to return?”
She made an affirmative sign of the head, and said, “Yes.”
He understood the motion of the head. “Alas!” he said, as though hesitating whether to finish, “I am—I am deaf.”
“ Poor man!” exclaimed the Bohemian, with an expression of kindly pity.
He began to smile sadly.
“ You think that that was all that I lacked, do you not? Yes, I am deaf, that is the way I am made. ’Tis horrible, is it not? You are so beautiful!”
There lay in the accents of the wretched man so profound a consciousness of his misery, that she had not the strength to say a word. Besides, he would not have heard her. He went on,—
“ Never have I seen my ugliness as at the present moment. When I compare myself to you, I feel a very great pity
