o the darkness on either side
of him, and wondering how it was he had not met the object of his
search as he came to the village. He ran on, occasionally taking trees
and fingerposts for men, and cursing his ill luck when he saw his
mistake. The sweat poured down his face in streams, and his knees
began to knock together with fatigue. Suddenly he struck his foot
against a stone lying in the road, and fell, cutting his forehead
severely upon some pebbles. The sharp pain drew a cry from him, and a
man who had been lying on the grass at the roadside, sprang up and
hastened to his assistance. At that moment a flash of summer lightning
lit up the road.

"Bernard! Bernard!" cried the painter, throwing his arms round the
stranger's neck. It was his brother.

Bernard started back with a cry of horror.

"Albert!" he exclaimed in a hollow voice, "Cannot your spirit rest? Do
you rise from the grave to persecute me?"

"In God's name, my dear brother, what mean you? I am Carl--Carl, your
twin brother."

"Carl? No! Albert! I see that horrid wound on your brow. It still
bleeds!"

The painter grasped his brother's hand.

"I am flesh and blood," said he, "and no spirit. Albert still lives."

"He lives!" exclaimed Bernard, and clasped his brother in his arms.

Explanations followed, and the brothers took the road to Berlin. When
the painter had replied to Bernard's questions concerning their
family, he in his turn begged his brother to relate his adventures
since they parted, and above all to give his reasons for remaining so
long severed from his friends and home.

"Although I fully believed Albert killed by the blow he received,"
replied Bernard, "it was no fear of punishment for my indirect share
in his death, that induced me to fly. But when I saw the father
senseless on the ground, and the son expiring before my eyes, I felt
as if I was accursed, as if the brand of Cain were on my brow, and
that it was my fate to roam through the world an isolated and
wretched being. When you all ran out of the school to fetch
assistance, it seemed to me as though each chair and bench and table
in the room received the power of speech, and yelled and bellowed in
my ears the fatal number which has been the cause of all my
misfortunes--'Thirteen! Thirteen! Thou art the Thirteenth, the
Accursed One!'

"I fled, and since that day no rest or peace has been mine. Like my
shadow has this unholy number clung to me. Wherever I went, in all the