will sleep now till nine, and then go out.
You must come to-morrow."

"At what time?"

"At ten he goes to the Law Courts. You must come before then."

"Thank you," said Manske, and drew Anna away. "Do not cry, _liebes
Kind_," he implored, his own eyes brimming with miserable tears. "Do not
let the coachman see you like this. We must go home now. There is
nothing to be done. We will come early to-morrow, and have more
success."

They stopped a moment in the dark entrance below, trying to compose
their faces before going out. They did not dare look at each other. Then
they went out and drove away.

The stars were shining as they passed along the quiet country road, and
all the way was drenched with the fragrance of clover and freshly-cut
hay. The sky above the rye fields on the left was still rosy. Not a leaf
stirred. Once, when the coachman stopped to take a stone out of a
horse's shoe, they could hear the crickets, and the cheerful humming of
a column of gnats high above their heads.

CHAPTER XXXI

Gustav von Lohm found Manske's telegram on his table when he came in
with his wife from his afternoon ride in the Thiergarten.

"What is it?" she inquired, seeing him turn pale; and she took it out of
his hand and read it. "Disgraceful," she murmured.

"I must go at once," he said, looking round helplessly.

"Go?"

When a wife says "Go?" in that voice, if she is a person of
determination and her husband is a person of peace, he does not go; he
stays. Gustav stayed. It is true that at first he decided to leave
Berlin by the early train next morning; but his wife employed the hours
of darkness addressing him, as he lay sleepless, in the language of
wisdom; and the wisdom being of that robust type known as worldly, it
inevitably produced its effect on a mind naturally receptive.

"Relations," she said, "are at all times bad enough. They do less for
you and expect more from you than anyone else. They are the last to
congratulate if you succeed, and the first to abandon if you fail. They
are at one and the same time abnormally truthful, and abnormally
sensitive. They regard it as infinitely more blessed to administer
home-truths than to receive them back again. But, so long as they do not
actually break the laws, prejudice demands that they shall be borne
with. In my family, no one ever broke the laws. It has been reserved for
my married life, this connection with criminals."

She was a woman of ready and