gotten the dreadful uncertainty in which my love was involved. But though this consciousness now returned with full force, the danger seemed less, and I was more inclined to take a brighter view of the future than I had been since my interview with Minna. This kind Philemon and Baucis couple were so intimately interwoven in the peaceful idyll of our love, that it needed only this meeting to refresh its colours and infuse them with a life-like light that drove away all fear of an impending tragic shadow. I had found them true friends, still possessed with the same confidence in our mutual happiness as before, and at a moment when this happiness was, I knew, in peril; and I considered this confidence to be still more valuable, because it rested upon ignorance, a circumstance that would, surely enough, have diminished its value in other people's eyes. But I just needed a support that had not even felt the shock. "Their confidence is not destined to meet with disappointment," I said to myself, "all will turn out for the best,—old Hertz shall not die, and I shall not lose Minna."
This conclusion was not exactly logical. But even had it been so, at this visit to the sick-bed I might, had I been less occupied by my own fate, have remarked many signs to fill me with fear that a stronger Disputant—the strongest of all—would say, "Nego majorem."
