completely mad;
but the Professor maintained the contrary. 'There are people,' he said,
'in whose cases Nature, or some destiny or other, has deprived them of
the cover--the exterior envelope--under which we others carry on our
madnesses unseen. They are like certain insects who have transparent
integuments, which (as we see the play of their muscular movements)
give the effect of a malformation, although everything is perfectly
normal. What never passes beyond the sphere of thought in us becomes
action in Krespel. The bitter scorn and rage which the soul, imprisoned
as it is in earthly conditions of being and action, often vividly
feels, Krespel carries out, or expresses, into external life, by
extraordinarily frantic gesticulations and hare jumps. But those are
his lightning conductors. What comes out of the earth he delivers back
to the earth again; the heavenly he retains, and consequently
apprehends it quite clearly and distinctly with his inner
consciousness, notwithstanding all the crackiness which we sparking out
of him. No doubt Antonia's unexpected loss touches him very keenly, but
I should bet that he'll be going on in his usual jog trot to-morrow as
if nothing had happened.'

"And it turned out very much as the Professor had expected: Krespel
appeared next morning very much as if nothing had happened. Only he
announced that he had given up fiddle-making, and would never play on
one again. And it afterwards appeared that he kept his word.

"All that I had heard from the Professor strengthened my conviction
that the relation in which Antonia had stood to Krespel--so very
intimate, and so carefully kept unexplained--as also the fact that she
was dead--very probably involved him in a very serious responsibility,
which he might find it by no means easy to clear himself from. I made
up my mind that I would not leave H---- until I had given him the full
benefit of my ideas on this subject. My notion was to thoroughly alarm
him, to appeal to his conscience, and, if I could, constrain him to a
full confession of his crime. The more I considered the matter the
clearer it seemed that he must be a terrible villain; and all the more
eloquent and impressive grew the allocution which I mentally got ready
to deliver to him, and which gradually took the form of a regular
masterpiece of rhetoric.

"Thus prepared for my attack, T betook myself to him in a condition of
much virtuous indignation one morning.

"I found him