It was wild, strange, melancholy, sometimes
sweet, but ever with a ringing note of woe so piercing as to stab,
recurring perpetually--such a note as comes throbbing to life now and
then in the "Sonate Pathetique," or in Raff's Fifth Symphony.

Eugen always went to Sigmund after he had gone to bed, and talked to him
or listened to him. I do not know if he taught him something like a
prayer at such times, or spoke to him of supernatural things, or upon
what they discoursed. I only know that it was an interchange of soul,
and that usually he came away from it looking glad. But to-night, after
remaining longer than usual, he returned with a face more haggard than I
had seen it yet.

He sat down opposite me at the table, and there was silence, with an
ever-deepening, sympathetic pain on my part. At last I raised my eyes to
his face; one elbow rested upon the table, and his head leaned upon his
hand. The lamp-light fell full upon his face, and there was that in it
which would let me be silent no longer, any more than one could see a
comrade bleeding to death, and not try to stanch the wound. I stepped up
to him and laid my hand upon his shoulder. He looked up drearily,
unrecognizingly, unsmilingly at me.

"Eugen, what hast thou?"

"_La mort dans l'ame_," he answered, quoting from a poem which we had
both been reading.

"And what has caused it?"

"Must you know, friend?" he asked. "If I did not need to tell it, I
should be very glad."

"I must know it, or--or leave you to it!" said I, choking back some
emotion. "I can not pass another day like this."

"And I had no right to let you spend such a day as this," he answered.
"Forgive me once again, Friedel--you who have forgiven so much and so
often."

"Well," said I, "let us have the worst, Eugen. It is something about--"

I glanced toward the door, on the other side of which Sigmund was
sleeping.

His face became set, as if of stone. One word, and one alone, after a
short pause, passed his lips--"_Ja!_"

I breathed again. It was so then.

"I told you, Friedel, that I should have to leave him?"

The words dropped out one by one from his lips, distinct, short, steady.

"Yes."

"That was bad, very bad. The worst, I thought, that could befall; but it
seems that my imagination was limited."

"Eugen, what is it?"

"I shall not have to leave him. I shall have to send him away from me."

As if with the utterance of the words, the very core and fiber of
resolut