Persistently, she remained at the door. "Let me in," she said. "I know, you'll do something to yourself, if you'll stay alone. You're thinking that I could betray you, because I've seen you coming in with the dagger. Oh, you're safe from me putting you into danger. Let me in, look into my face, and then tell me whether you'd think that I would do anything bad to you. Haven't I already suspected for a long time that you were the one they've been looking for? In my dreams, I've seen you stained with blood. But still, I don't hate you. I knew that you were unhappy; I could give my life, if you asked me to." She put her ear against the door, but there was no answer. Instead, she heard him stepping to the window opening onto the canal and busying himself there with something. A mortal fear came over her, she rattled at the door, she shouted again, she deplored him in the most moving words not to perform any desperate act - all in vain. When finally, everything had become quiet inside, she pushed, in terrible agony, hard against the door with her shoulders and tried to break the lock, employing all of her strength. The old woodwork broke, only the frame held. The hole, which she had broken into the door, allowed her slender figure to just barely slip through. The room was empty; she searched him in all niches in vain. When she stepped to the open window, not doubting any longer that he had jumped into the canal, she hardly dared to peer down over the ledge into the depth. But what she saw restored her lost hope. A rope was hanging down the wall, being attached to a firm hook underneath the ledge. It extended down to the surface of the water. If someone would push himself off the wall with his feet, after having reached the lower end of the rope, he should easily be able to swing to the stairs on the other side by the palace of the countess and into the gondola, which was usually chained to the pole there. Today, it had disappeared, and the lonely girl, looking down the dark gorge of the canal in vain, trying to discover a trace of the fugitive, was at least left with the comforting belief that he could not have chosen a safer course, if he wanted to safe himself. It had been his intention to make her believe that. He did not want to burden the soul of this innocent creature, whom he had already given enough grief, with the entire, harsh truth that there was nothing left which could save him, since he was unable to flee from himself. The poor girl was still looking out of the window, and her tears fell bitterly into the black waters below, when Andrea was already steering his gondola out into the Grand Canal. The palaces on both sides towered darkly over the face of the water. He passed by the house of Morosini, he saw the palace of Venier, and a sense of horror made his hair stand on ends. Here, his life lay before him like being encircled by a ring; what a beginning and what an end! -