would renounce her a second time, and later, because
she did not want to become a fresh burden to me. She knew that I had
taken another name, and was living in the strictest seclusion. If she
should suddenly appear with her child, it might not be convenient for
me. But, when she should be no more--and this must be soon, for her
lungs grew weaker every day--she begged me not to let the child suffer
for the wrong her mother had done me. It was a good child, unspoiled as
yet, but with little sense and very giddy. She needed a father's hand
to guide her through her years of danger. She had appealed in vain to
the child's father in the first years after his desertion of her. But,
when no answer came, she had taken an oath that he should be dead to
her forever. She had found no difficulty in keeping it, for she hated
him now as much as she had once loved him.

"For the child's sake she would now speak his name for the first time
in eighteen years, so that if he should still be alive her father might
call him to account and force him to make provision for his orphaned
daughter.

"And then followed a short word of farewell and the name of my child,
and beside it in brackets that of her betrayer, which was also on the
back of the daguerreotype, where, with his own hand, he had written
some words of presentation to my daughter.

"Give me a glass of water, my dear friend. My tongue cleaves to the
roof of my mouth, as if I had swallowed the dust of a whole graveyard!
So--thank you--and now I shall soon have done.

"For I shall take good care not to tell you how I have spent my time
since the receipt of this legacy. I sometimes realized myself how much
like a madman I must have looked as I rushed about the streets, at all
hours of the day and night, peering under the hats of all the young
girls, and forcing my way into the houses wherever I caught the
faintest glimpse of red hair at the window."

"Holy Moses!" interrupted Schnetz, springing up and pacing the hall
with long strides, all the while furiously twisting at his imperial.
"Why didn't you tell us this before? Why, it must be our Zenz!"

The old man bowed his head with a sigh.

"I first learned it, or rather guessed it, yesterday, when I happened
to meet Herr Rosenbusch, and he told me of all that had happened here.
It came upon me like a flash; this red-haired servant and my
granddaughter, who felt so little desire to know the grandfather who
had cast off her mother