event your disgrace? Do you want the fluff-picker to despise you?"
Now her eyes made him drop his. "Do you know what you are? Ask him
what a woman is who forgets her honor and her duty. Of whom do you
think as you should think only of your husband? When you creep about
like a wench in love wherever you think you will see him? And you
think that people are blind. Ask him what he calls that kind of a
woman? Oh, people have fine names for a woman of that sort."

He saw how she started, shocked. Her arm quivered in his hand. He saw
she was beginning to understand him, was beginning to understand
herself. He had feared her obstinacy--and behold, she was breaking
down! The angry red faded in her cheek and a blush of shame flushed
wildly over its pallor. He saw her eyes seek the ground as if she felt
the gaze of all men fixed upon her, as if the shed, the fence, the
trees all had eyes and they were all staring into hers. He saw how in
the suddenness of her perception she called herself one of the women
for whom people have such fine names.

The pain poured its rain over her burning cheeks that bled with shame
and her tears were like oil; the fire grew when a voice sounded from
the shed and his tread was heard. She tried to tear herself violently
away and looked up with a half wild, half imploring glance that,
dying, sank again to the ground before the thousand eyes that were
fixed upon her. He saw that the eye of the man who was coming through
the shed was the most terrible of all to her. He was again in
possession of all his courage.

"Tell him,"--he forced the words out softly--"what you want of him. If
he is as you think he is he must despise you."

Fritz Nettenmair held the struggling woman fast with the strength of
the victor until he had beckoned to Apollonius, who stepped
questioningly out of the shed, to come over to him. He let her go and
she fled into the house. Apollonius, shocked, stopped halfway up to
him.

"You see how she is," Fritz said to him. "I told her you wanted to ask
her. If you like we will go after her, and she must confess to us.
I'll see whether my wife can safely insult my brother, who is so
good."

Apollonius had to restrain him. Fritz would not consent at first.
Finally he said: "Well, now you see, at least, that it is not my
fault. Oh, I am so sorry!"

There was an involuntary dismay in the last words which Apollonius
connected with the failure at a reconciliation. Fritz Nettenmair
repe