the day of her recovery. Every trace of youth and bloom was swept away by that illness. She never had been beautiful; she had scarcely been pretty, except during that short period of happiness which I had destroyed. Conrad Perlenberg's love was the sun which had made her beauty bloom, and my violence was the frost which killed it. I asked her forgiveness on my knees, and she gave it me at once: she had always idolised me since my babyhood, and her affection was not by one whit weakened after the catastrophe. We began life again at the beginning. I worked for Anna, and, thank God, I was able to keep her from starving. It was the least I could do, after all."
Vincenz paused again. He had told the facts plainly, without adding a comment; but the very bareness of the statement, given in that deeply tremulous voice, made it the more impressive. He said no word of the bitter desolation, the agony of self-reproach, which had been lived through, and which yet had to be lived down and thrust under in the battle for life on which he had then entered. A man cast in a sterner or a more callous mould would have more quickly shaken off that ghastly impression; for, alter all, he had not overstepped the recognised code of honour which society had set up. But Vincenz was not of that iron hardness. His mind was too keenly sensitive, too intellectually refined, to be so easily quit of that haunting memory. The world's code of honour shrank into nothing beside the accusation of his own conscience. No one, not even Anna, had ever guessed at the moments of discouragement and self-disgust which had threatened to overpower him. For a nature like his to suppress that gnawing remorse, and to rise to the emergency of the moment, was an effort almost heroic. He had no leisure for lamentation and sterile regrets, no opportunities for indulging in self-accusing tears; even sackcloth and ashes were luxuries which he could ill afford. Stern moralists might condemn him to do penance; but how of the poor penitent who has no money to buy the sackcloth, and no time to collect the ashes?
Vincenz was forced to act at once, and to enter the lists in the vulgar battle for bare life. He had fought that battle bravely, and he had fought it alone; for Anna, successfully deceived as to the extent of their poverty, had never attempted to contribute her share of labour. She continued to bully and adore her brother now as before, never by a single word of reproach hinting at the happiness which she had lost through his fault. She knew he worked, but she did not know how hard he worked; and never to this day did she suspect how Vincenz used to sit with locked door, writing all night at his desk, so as to get through double work; nor how often, when he declared he was going to dine with a friend, and she scolded him in her querulous fashion for his dissipation, he would walk the streets alone, and come back looking rather pale: and all this only to lessen the butcher's bill, which he knew they could not pay.
Vincenz did not in any word refer to those past years; but some dim reflection of what must have been, could not fail to dawn in Gretchen's mind.
They had walked for some minutes in silence, when Vincenz, more in his ordinary voice, said –
"That is the whole of my story. I have not often indulged in a passion since then; a temper is a luxury which a poor man cannot afford
