He also had been sentenced to a three months’ term in a fortress in consonance with the invariable custom followed in such cases by the Kaiser, which makes no distinction between offender and offended, between victim and aggressor. But in this instance a confinement of a few days was considered ample, and at the expiration of this brief term the imperial pardon reached the broken-down man, and he was permitted to depart to wherever his inclination might take him. Kahle thus saw his life’s labor destroyed. As a man who had scarcely reached forty, yet with his physical strength nearly spent, he had to face the question how and where he was to carve out a new field of activity for himself. His small pension was wholly insufficient to enable him to even eke out an existence on it, and he had, besides, by the decree of the court, been intrusted with the sole custody of his child. This, while it gave him at least an object in life, was for a man in his circumstances an additional grave burden; for his little son was still of that tender age to require a woman’s constant ministrations. The small fortune which his divorced wife had brought into their marriage had, of course, been handed back to her by the law. And why had all this misfortune overtaken him? Because the army code and social conventions had bidden him to save as much of the “honor” of his wife as he could. To this mistaken idea he had been sacrificed. And Kolberg was domiciled by the vine-clad borders of the Rhine, and in his new garrison led a life as dissipated and as free of care as he had in his former one. CHAPTER VII AN AIRY STRUCTURE COLLAPSES Seated at his desk in his elegantly furnished apartments, we see First Lieutenant Borgert. Before him lay a large sheet of paper covered with rows of figures, and all around him whole mountains of documents, bills, and vari-colored envelopes. One after another he took up these bits of paper, and from them noted down amounts on the big sheet. He had already reached the third column when he suddenly ceased his labors and threw the pencil disgustedly away. Then he grasped the whole pile and threw it into the fire, where in a few moments it was consumed in the leaping flame and reduced to a tiny mass of ashes. His laudable purpose had been to go through all the claims against him, so far as they had been presented. Usually his simple method was to throw bills, as they reached him, into the stove; but for once he had been curious to find out how much he really owed in the world, or at least to gain an approximate idea of his indebtedness.