for Elsa was at least partly dispelled when he told me, a few nights later, of a tragic thing that had happened to both of them.
He came into my room at the Domhof as though he had just seen a ghost. And indeed it was a ghost that had frightened him and put a cold hand between him and Elsa.
"My dear old man!" I cried at the sight of him. "What on earth has happened?"
"A damnable and inconceivable thing!"
I poured him out some brandy and he drank it in gulps. Then he did a strange and startling thing. Fumbling in his breast-pocket he pulled out a silver cigarette-case and going over to the fireplace dropped it into the blaze of the wood logs which I had had lighted because of the dampness of the room.
"Why do you do that?" I asked.
He watched the metal box blacken, and then begin to melt. Several times he poked it so as to get it deeper into the red embers.
"My poor little Elsa!" he said in a pitiful way. "Mein hübsches Mädel!"
The story he told me later was astounding. Even now to people who were not in the war, who do not know many strange, fantastic things happened in that wild nightmare, it will seem improbable and untrue. Indeed, I think the central fact was untrue, except as a subjective reality in the minds of Brand and Elsa.
It happened when they were sitting alone in Elizabeth von Detmold's drawing-room. I fancy they must have been embracing each other, though Brand did not tell me that. Anyhow, Elsa put her hand into his breast-pocket and in a playful way pulled out his cigarette-case.
"May I open it?" she asked.
But she did not open it. She stared at a little mono-
