t. A mad world, my masters."
But sometimes he had a gleam of suspicion that it was he that had
lacked sanity. His Will had become mere wilfulness. In his love as in
his crusade he had shut his eyes to the brute facts; had precipitated
what could only be coaxed. "I die by my own hand," he said. If he had
only married Rosalie Zander, who still lived on, loving him! These
Russian and Bavarian minxes were neurotic, fickle, shifting as sand;
the daughters of Judaea were sane, cheerful, solid. Then he thought of
his own sister married to that vulgarian, Friedland. He saw her, a
rosy-cheeked girl, sitting at the Passover table, with its picturesque
ritual. How happy were those far-off pious days! And then he felt a
cold wind, remembering how Riekchen had hidden her face to laugh at
these mediaeval mummeries, and to spit out the bitter herbs, so
meaningless to her.

O terrible tragi-comedy of life, O strange, tangled world, in which
poor, petty man must walk, tripped by endless coils--religion, race,
sex, custom, wealth, poverty! World that from boyhood he had seemed to
see stretching so clearly before him, to be mapped out with lucid
logic, to be bestridden with triumphant foot by men become as gods,
knowing good and evil.

Only one thing was left--to die unbroken.

He had his lawyer brought to his bedside, went through his last
testament again, left money for the Union, recommended it to the
workers as their one sure path of salvation. Moses had only been
permitted to gaze upon the Promised Land, but the Chosen People--the
Germans--should yet luxuriate in its milk and honey.

A month after his meeting with Helene on the Righi--a month after his
glad shout, "By all the gods of Greece, 'tis she!"--he was a corpse,
the magic voice silent for ever; while the woman he had sought was to
give herself to his slayer, and the movement he had all but abandoned
for her was to become a great power in the State, under the
ever-growing glamour of his memory.

The Countess bent over the body. A strange, grim joy mingled with her
rage and despair. None of all these women had the right to share in
her grief. He belonged to her--to her and the People. Yes, she would
bear the body of her _cher enfant_ through the provinces of the
Rhine--he had been murdered by a cunning political plot, the People
who loved him should rise and avenge their martyred Messiah.

And suddenly she remembered with a fresh pang the one woman who had a
right to sh