e quiet voices were real, and they
continued; and there was a dead body in the next room, the beautiful,
dead body of a child. The breach between the parents had made the
child ill; pain at her father's savage attack on her mother had broken
her little heart.

When the new day sent its first glimmer of light through his window,
Apollonius rose from the chair on which he had sat ever since his
return to his room. There was something solemn in the manner in which
he stood upright. He seemed to say to himself: "If it is as I fear, I
must act for us both; it is for that that I am a man. I have sworn to
uphold my father's house and his honor, and I will do what I have
sworn to do, in every sense."

Fritz Nettenmair woke at last. He knew nothing more of the
dream-scenes of the night. He only knew that his wife had magnified
the "spy's" desire to be coddled into an illness so that she might
have an excuse for being together with "him." He began to think of how
he should put an end to this coddling. With this idea in his mind he
stepped through the door and stood--before a dead body. A shudder ran
over him. The dead child lay there before him like a sign to warn him:
"You shall not go farther on the way that you have taken!" There the
child lay, his child, and she was dead. The child stood before him, an
accuser and a witness. She bore witness for her mother. The mother had
known that she was dying; and at the deathbed of her child not even
the lowest creature would do what he had thought her capable of doing.
The child accused him. He had struck a mother at the side of her
child's deathbed. No man can do that, not even if the woman were
guilty. And she was not; the child testified to that. Now he knew that
the pale, dumb countenance of the mother had cried: "You will kill the
child; don't strike!" And he had struck nevertheless. He had killed
the child. That thought fell on him like a thunder-bolt, so that he
collapsed before the child's bed, across which he had struck her
mother, before the bed in which his child had died because he struck
her mother.

There he lay a long time. The bolt that struck him down had lighted
the past with cruel distinctness: he had seen them both innocent whom
he persecuted. And there was no guilt but his. He alone had built up
the misery that lay crushingly upon him, load on load, guilt on guilt.
But after all it was not yet too late! He heard his wife's quiet step
in the hall coming toward th