ervants to pack her trunk and her coachman to be
ready to leave in a few minutes.

An hour later she was on her way to the estate at Siegmundshof, about
ten miles from the baronial residence. Her maid accompanied her. But she
was utterly unable to find peace there. During the day she would pace
back and forth through the rooms, crying and wringing her hands; at
night she would lie down, but not to sleep. On the fourth day she
returned to the city, had the carriage driven to the residence of Count
Urlich, and sent her coachman in to get the Countess. Emilia came down,
terrified, to know what her mother wanted. The Baroness told her that
she wished her to accompany her to Herr Carovius, whose address she had
found in the city directory.

Herr Carovius had waited in vain for the news the Baroness had promised
him. His anger got the best of him: he decided to make an example of the
Auffenberg family, and, with this end in view, entered their house as
the personal embodiment of punitive justice. When he was told that he
could not be admitted, he began once more to start trouble; he raged and
stormed like a madman. The servants came running out from all quarters;
finally a policeman appeared on the scene and questioned him. The porter
then dragged him from the house and out through the big gate at the
entrance to the grounds, where he stood surrounded by a crowd of curious
but not entirely disinterested people, bare-headed, waving his arms and
striking an imaginary adversary with his fists--a picture, all told, of
anger intensified to the point of insanity.

His backers at once got wind of his fruitless attempts to collect. They
became uneasy, gave Herr Carovius himself a deal of trouble, and finally
appointed a lawyer to take charge of the case. In the meantime Herr
Carovius had learned through a spy that it had come to a complete break
between the Baron and the Baroness, that the latter had left within two
days with bag and baggage, and that great consternation prevailed among
the servants and friends of the family.

A voluptuous light crept across Herr Carovius's face: here was defeat
and despair, weeping and gnashing of teeth; what more could he wish? He
felt that he was personally the annihilator of the collective
aristocracy. And if it is possible to take a fiendish delight in
witnessing the destruction of what one after all despises, how much
greater may this joy be when the thing destroyed is something one loves
a