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Then he settled himself in his chair, and told me his story very much as I have told it, from the afternoon of the day on which Alexander disappeared to the moment when Paul left his mother at Teinach in the Black Forest. He told me also how Professor Cutter had written to him his account of the accident at Weissenstein, when Madame Patoff, as he said, had attempted to commit suicide.

At Teinach the valley is wider than in other places, and a huge establishment, built over the wonderful iron springs, rears above the tops of the trees its walls of mingled stone, wood and stucco, gayly painted and ornamented with balconies and pavilions, in startling and unpleasant contrast with the sober darkness of the surroundings.

Three days later Paul descended from the train which runs twice a day from Pforzheim to Constance, at a station in the heart of the Swabian Black Forest. The name painted in black Gothic letters over the neat, cottage-like building before which the train stopped was Teinach.

Alexander had resembled her, too, and had always acted like an irritable, beautiful, spoiled child. There was a distinct streak of "queerness," as Cutter expressed it, in the family. Probably Paul had inherited it in a different way. His conduct at Teinach, after leaving his mother, had been strange.