For a while he freely answered all her questions. At length he said, "Aunt Thekla, I have some information to ask of you. Red Jakob, whom I encountered by chance in Thalrode to-day, told me some strange things, the nature of which I hardly need explain to you." Aunt Thekla made no reply, but her face betrayed her dismay. "You wrote me," Johann Leopold went on, after a pause, "that you had agreed never to speak of Johanna. I am sorry to grieve you, but I should be sorry to do any one injustice: therefore pray tell me, did Otto give Johanna cause for jealousy? I do not ask for any details; I ask but a simple yes or no." "He knows everything," the old lady said to herself, and, incapable of a direct denial of the truth, she answered, "Yes, unfortunately!" Johann Leopold's head sank upon his breast. "And my grandfather was told nothing of this?" he asked. "No; my brother thinks that Otto and Johanna quarrelled on account of her paternal relatives; that Otto required her to choose between ourselves and those people----" "And Otto allowed my grandfather to remain in this error?" cried Johann Leopold. His aunt laid her hand on his arm in terror. "You will not explain it to him? Oh, I beg you, I entreat you, not to do so! You can do no good. Johanna cannot live among us again. And my brother, with his sense of honour,--his devotion to duty----Oh, I pray you spare him!" And she burst into tears. "Be easy," said Johann Leopold. "I promise you to tell my grandfather nothing that need not be told. One question more. What do you know of Johanna?" "She is with her step-mother. The woman has married again,--the circus-rider Batti, and poor Johanna has joined his troupe." It was true, then! Johann Leopold had put no faith in the newspaper notice which Red Jakob had given him, but he now reflected that this was the natural course of things. The artist-blood of her father, and her step-mother's unfortunate second marriage, had, when she had broken with Dönninghausen, forced Johanna into the path she had taken. Perhaps, with her intensity of nature, she had meant to erect an insuperable barrier between the past and the present. She had done so. This barrier was as insurmountable in Johann Leopold's estimation as in the eyes of the world. Every drop of blood in his body was in revolt against the rider in Carlo Batti's troupe. And Aunt Thekla's 'Johanna can never live among us again' was the expression of his own conviction.