It took time for the words to penetrate his consciousness. Then he started up, staring about him as though roused out of a dream. The conversation had proceeded rather slowly, for Hans Castorp spoke French uneasily, feeling for the sense. The piano had been silent awhile, now it sounded again, under the hands of the man from Mannheim, who had relieved the Slavic youth. He put some music in place, and Fräulein Engelhart sat down beside him to turn the leaves. The party was thinning out; many of the guests had presumably taken up the horizontal. From where they sat they could see no one; but there were players at the card-tables in the writing-room.

“You are going to⁠—what?” Hans Castorp asked, quite dashed.

“I am going away,” she repeated, smiling with pretended surprise at his discomfiture.

“Impossible,” he said. “You are jesting.”

“Not at all. I am perfectly serious. I am leaving.”

“When?”