repeat, and I beg
your pardon for doing it; but I was obliged. Will you give me a word of
denial?"

Silence!

I looked at Eugen. We were all looking at him. Three things I looked for
as equally likely for him to do; but he did none. He did not start up
in an indignant denial; he did not utter icily an icy word of contempt;
he did not smile and ask Karl if he were out of his senses. He dropped
his eyes, and maintained a deadly silence.

Karl was looking at him, and his candid face changed. Doubt, fear,
dismay succeeded one another upon it. Then, in a lower and changed
voice, as if first admitting the idea that caution might be necessary:

"_Um Gotteswillen_, Eugen! Speak!"

He looked up--so may look a dog that is being tortured--and my very
heart sickened; but he did not speak.

A few moments--not half a minute--did we remain thus. It seemed a
hundred years of slow agony. But during that time I tried to comprehend
that my friend of the bright, clear eyes, and open, fearless glance;
the very soul and flower of honor; my ideal of almost Quixotic
chivalrousness, stood with eyes that could not meet ours that hung upon
him; face white, expression downcast, accused of a crime which came, if
ever crime did, under the category "dirty," and not denying it!

Karl, the wretched beginner of the wretched scene, came nearer, took the
other's hand, and, in a hoarse whisper, said:

"For God's sake, Eugen, speak! Deny it! You can deny it--you must deny
it!"

He looked up at last, with a tortured gaze; looked at Karl, at me, at
the faces around. His lips quivered faintly. Silence yet. And yet it
seemed to me that it was loathing that was most strongly depicted upon
his face; the loathing of a man who is obliged to intimately examine
some unclean thing; the loathing of one who has to drag a corpse about
with him.

"Say it is a lie, Eugen!" Karl conjured him.

At last came speech; at last an answer; slow, low, tremulous, impossible
to mistake or explain away.

"No; I can not say so."

His head--that proud, high head--dropped again, as if he would fain
avoid our eyes.

Karl raised himself. His face too was white. As if stricken with some
mortal blow, he walked away. Some people who had surrounded us turned
aside and began to whisper to each other behind their music. Von
Francius looked impenetrable; May Wedderburn white. The noise and
bustle was still going on all around, louder than before. The drama had
not taken three