had become of her ring; she could make no reply.
Her husband thought that she had dropped it somewhere, hunted everywhere
for it, but nowhere could he find it. Gloom descended upon him, he
decided to return home as speedily as possible, and as soon as the
doctor permitted they quitted the capital.... But imagine! On the very
day of their departure they suddenly encountered, on the street, a
litter.... In that litter lay a man who had just been killed, with a
cleft skull---and just imagine! that man was that same dreadful
nocturnal visitor with the wicked eyes.... He had been killed over a
game of cards!

"Then my friend went away to the country, and became a mother for the
first time ... and lived several years with her husband. He never
learned anything about that matter, and what could she say? She herself
knew nothing. But her former happiness had vanished. Darkness had
invaded their life--and that darkness was never dispelled.... They had
no other children either before or after ... but that son...."

My mother began to tremble all over, and covered her face with her
hands.

"But tell me now," she went on, with redoubled force, "whether my friend
was in any way to blame? With what could she reproach herself? She was
punished, but had not she the right to declare, in the presence of God
himself, that the punishment which overtook her was unjust? Then why can
the past present itself to her, after the lapse of so many years, in so
frightful an aspect, as though she were a sinner tortured by the
gnawings of conscience? Macbeth slew Banquo, so it is not to be
wondered at that he should have visions ... but I...."

But my mother's speech became so entangled and confused that I ceased to
understand her ... I no longer had any doubt that she was raving in
delirium.

X

Any one can easily understand what a shattering effect my mother's
narration produced upon me! I had divined, at her very first word, that
she was speaking of herself, and not of any acquaintance of hers; her
slip of the tongue only confirmed me in my surmise. So it really was my
father whom I had sought out in my dream, whom I had beheld when wide
awake! He had not been killed, as my mother had supposed, but merely
wounded.... And he had come to her, and had fled, affrighted by her
fright. Everything suddenly became clear to me; the feeling of
involuntary repugnance for me which sometimes awoke in my mother, and
her constant sadness, and our