joy another sleep. Whilst occupied the old man
related with ill-concealed joy, that Parson Neuser had in the most
wonderful manner escaped from prison. The small door of the secret
passage had been found open, and the Keeper had been arrested for
having lost the key. Neuser had many friends in the town and it was not
astonishing that aid had been given him. But the Kurfuerst saw in this a
proof, that the Arian conspiracy still existed, and it was reported
that in his anger he had ordered the Amtmann for this cause to execute
the sentence of death on Sylvanus and his colleagues Vehe and Suter.
"May their bones bleach on the gallows," said Felix coldly, as he
turned his face to the wall, and calmly continued his slumbers.

CHAPTER XI.

The day following the adventure which took place in front of the
Baptist's house in the Kreuzgrund, Magister Paul strode through the
woods as if in a dream, and lost himself among the trees. It was no
longer a gloomy conception but the pure naked truth; a just but coarse
hand had torn aside the veil from the well guarded secret of his inmost
self, and before the very people who looked on him as a saint, he had
stood a convicted criminal, a perverter of the young, a juggler who
mis-used the Holiest of Holies to indulge his passions. The fettered
witch, for whom the stake now waited, appeared to him worthy of envy in
comparison to the _role_ which he had played, and the outcast woman
had herself felt this, so joyously did her eyes sparkle, as she
shrieked out his secret to the world at large. The heretical Baptist
had treated him as a miserable sinner and he could give him no reply.
Moreover Erastus his benefactor had sunk down before him as if pierced
to the heart by the treacherous bullet which he had fired in ambush at
the man, who had ever done him kindness. "O my God!" stammered Paul as
he stumbled among the bushes and underwood, "that did I not will. Thou
art my witness; I wished to injure no one, it was some baneful spell,
which hurried her and me to destruction." As if to escape his own
thoughts he rushed breathless up the mountain. "A spell," whispered the
spirit of self extenuation to him. "Was it a spell?" Might not the
witch have kindled in his breast this sinful flame, in which all his
good resolutions were ever consumed. As if he had eaten mad-wort had he
hastened in blind rage to his own downfall. Or perhaps indeed this
beautiful child was