s engaged in mending a wagon.
At sight of his child bleeding and in a swoon he wrung his hands. Peter
opened one eye; but the other only bled the faster.

"Who did this?" asked Hansgeorge, with clenched fists, looking from his
wailing boy to the trembling Constantine.

"I fell from the tree," said Peter, closing the sound eye also. "Oh,
God! Oh, God! my eye is running out."

Without waiting to hear more, Constantine ran off to Horb for young
Erath, who now held the post of his late father. Finding that the
doctor had gone out, he ran up and down before the house in unspeakable
agony: he kept one hand pressed upon one of his eyes, as if to keep the
misfortune of Peter vividly before his mind; he bit his lips till they
bled; he wished to fly into the wide, wide world as a criminal; and
again he wished to stay, to save what could be saved. He borrowed a
saddle-horse, and hardly had the expected one come home when he hurried
him on the horse and away; but he travelled faster on foot than the
surgeon did on horseback. The eye was declared irretrievably lost.
Constantine closed both his eyes: night and darkness seemed to fall
upon him. Hansgeorge, with the tears streaming from his eyes, sat
absorbed in bitter thoughts, and held the stump of his forefinger
convulsively in the gripe of his other hand. He regarded the maiming of
his child as a chastisement from God for having wantonly mutilated
himself. He expended all the gentleness of which his nature was capable
on poor unoffending Peter, who was doomed to expiate his father's sin.
But Peter's mother--our old friend Kitty--was less humble, and said
openly that she was sure that accursed Constantine was the fault of it
all. She drove him out of the house, and swore she would break his
collar-bone if he ever crossed the threshold again.

Peter persisted in his account of the matter, and Constantine suffered
cruelly. He would run about in the field as if an evil spirit were at
his heels, and when he saw a stone his heart would tremble. "Cain!
Cain!" he often cried. He would fain have fled to the desert like him
too, but always came home again.

It was three days before he ventured to see his companion. He prepared
himself for a merciless beating; but the wrath of the mother had gone
down, and no harm befell him.

He found Ivo sitting by the patient's bedside, holding his hand.
Pushing Ivo aside, he took Peter's hands in silence, his breath
trembling. At last he said,--