ld
travel. The house-steward had draped the great hall in black, and had
had the old Freiherr laid out in the clothes in which he had been
found, on a magnificent state-bed, and this he had surrounded with tall
silver candlesticks with burning wax-candles. Wolfgang ascended the
stairs, entered the hall, and approached close to his father's corpse,
without speaking a word. There he stood with his arms folded on his
chest, gazing with a fixed and gloomy look and with knitted brows, into
his father's pale countenance. He was like a statue; not a tear came
from his eyes. At length, with an almost convulsive movement of the
right arm towards the corpse, he murmured hoarsely, "Did the stars
compel you to make the son whom you loved miserable?" Throwing his
hands behind his back and stepping a short pace backwards, the Baron
raised his eyes upwards and said in a low and well-nigh broken voice,
"Poor, infatuated old man! Your carnival farce with its shallow
delusions is now over. Now you no doubt see that the possessions which
are so niggardly dealt out to us here on earth have nothing in common
with Hereafter beyond the stars. What will--what power can reach over
beyond the grave?" The Baron was silent again for some seconds, then he
cried passionately, "No, your perversity shall not rob me of a grain of
my earthly happiness, which you strove so hard to destroy," and
therewith he took a folded paper out of his pocket and held it up
between two fingers to one of the burning candles that stood close
beside the corpse. The paper was caught by the flame and blazed up
high; and as the reflection flickered and played upon the face of the
corpse, it was as though its muscles moved and as though the old man
uttered toneless words, so that the servants who stood some distance
off were filled with great horror and awe. The Baron calmly finished
what he was doing by carefully stamping out with his foot the last
fragment of paper that fell on the floor blazing. Then, casting yet
another moody glance upon his father, he hurriedly left the hall.

On the following day Daniel reported to the Freiherr the damage that
had been done to the tower, and described at great length all that had
taken place on the night when their dear dead master died; and he
concluded by saying that it would be a very wise thing to have the
tower repaired at once, for, if a further fall were to take place,
there would be some danger of the whole castle--well, if not