Perhaps the lark that he had heard singing a quarter of an hour before had recognised him, for it had ceased singing.

The peacock continued its screaming, and its doleful cries sounded like a warning.

Yes, the man seated among the heather, employed in narrating his own history to himself, was indeed Samuel Brohl, and the proof of this was that he had laughed, while Count Abel Larinski never laughed; moreover, for four years the latter had been out of the world.

The second reason is, perhaps, the better.
He whom, with or without his consent, we shall call henceforth Samuel Brohl, reproached himself for this access of levity, as he would have reproached himself for a false note that had escaped him in executing a Mozart sonata.

He resumed his grave, dignified air, in order to salute with a wave of his hand the phantom that had just appeared before him.
It was the same that he had summoned one evening at the Hotel Steinbock, and treated there as an addle-brain, as a visionary, and even as an imbecile; but this time he gave him a more indulgent and gracious reception.