Pommer was, as we have seen, not precisely of delicate stuff, either bodily or in his psychic makeup. But the chains he was wearing nevertheless galled him, and he not seldom manœuvred with his charmer to obtain release; but all in vain. More than once he thought seriously of writing to Captain Kahle himself, confessing his guilt, glossing over her own share of it, and offering all the reparation in his power. That would mean, of course, exposing his own precious life to the unerring bullet of the captain; but even that outlook appeared to him preferable to his present life of deceit. He now regretted that he had not followed, the morning after the Casino hop, his first impulse of making a clean breast of it to Captain Kahle. Thus weeks dragged on, and there was no prospect of a change in a situation which gradually became intolerable to him. But suddenly, without his having done anything to bring it about, the day came that granted him escape from his degrading entanglement. The imperial order arrived, promoting him to the grade of First Lieutenant and transferring him to another garrison, far in the interior of the country. She was the first person he informed of it. “Farewell! We shall not see each other again!” He spoke quite coolly, almost callously, and he left her cowering on the sofa and weeping hysterically. He felt a free man again. The abominable shackles had fallen from him. If he had seen Frau Kahle five minutes after he had left her he would not even have retained for her a vestige of that first tenderness that had swept over him that night in the Casino garden. For when he had retired, and she had heard his step on the flagging of the hall below, she had quickly risen and peered, from behind the lace curtains, into the street after his vanishing figure. Then she had sat down at the piano and intoned a merry Strauss waltz. But then she reflected that they might call her heartless. So she had indited a long, passionate farewell letter to him. He showed it, the night before his going, to Borgert at the Casino. They were all his guests that night. Borgert had screamed with laughter. “What a devilish smart little woman she is, after all,” he had exclaimed. And then, poising in mid-air his champagne glass, he said, nodding to Pommer: “Here’s to her and her simpleton!” He spoke from experience. CHAPTER IV THE CASE OF SERGEANT SCHMITZ Late in the forenoon of a raw day in autumn Vice-Sergeant-Major Roth was seated in his comfortably heated room, and near him Sergeant Schmitz. Each was enjoying a cup of coffee.