the table at which she ate. She hated the people who came to see
her parents, the customers who came into the shop, the loafers who
gathered about the window, the tall lanky Zwanziger, the books and the
magazines.

But the day she overheard her father and mother talking about that
money, a second power had joined the ranks of hate in her benighted,
abandoned soul. With her brain on fire she stood behind the door, and
heard that she was to be married to Daniel. This remark had filled the
then thirteen-year-old girl with all the savage instincts of a bound and
fettered woman, with all the crabbedness of an unimaginative person of
her standing.

In her father's remark she did not see merely a more or less carefully
outlined plan; she heard a message from Fate itself; and from that time
on she lived with an idea that brought light and purpose into her daily
existence.

Shortly after his arrival in Nuremberg, she saw Daniel for the first
time as he was standing by a booth in the market place on Schuett Island.
Her father had pointed him out to her. She knew that he wished to become
a musician; this made no special impression on her. She knew that he was
having a hard time of it; this filled her neither with sympathy nor
regret. When she later on saw him in the concert hall, he was already
her promised spouse; he belonged to her. To capture him, to get him into
her power, it made no difference how, was her unchanging aspiration, in
which there was a bizarre mixture of bestiality and insanity.

The thieving, which she decided upon at once and practised with perfect
regularity, netted her in the course of time a handsome sum. She did not
become bolder and bolder as she continued her evil practices, but,
unlike thieves generally, she grew to be more and more cautious. She
acquired in time remarkable skill at showing an outwardly honest face.
Indeed she became such an adept at dissimulation that the suspicion of
even Jason Philip, aroused as it had been during the course of a
careful investigation, was dispelled by her behaviour.

Her plan was to gain a goodly measure of independence through the money
she had stolen. For she always felt convinced that the day would come
when her parents would debar her from their home. She was convinced that
her father and mother were merely waiting for some plausible excuse to
rid themselves of her for good and all.

Moreover, she had two pronounced passions: one for candy and one for
fla