"If you dance on the stage, Ingigerd, I'll go out of my mind. I feel as if you and I and our love would be exposed in the pillory. If it were I instead of you, it would not be half so hard to stand." The poor young scholar began again to pour out before the little vampire all the anguish he had been suffering, this time with hot kisses and embraces. "I am a drowning man. If you do not hold your hand out to me I shall sink forever. You are stronger than I am. You can save me. The world is nothing to me. What I lost is nothing, was nothing and will always be nothing to me, if only I can exchange it for you. Come with me, and you shall be all in all to me, the one thing of significance in my life." "You are not weak," the girl whispered with a dying-away look in her eyes. She breathed heavily, her narrow lips parted, and that fatal, seductive smile spread over her languishing face, like a mask. "Take me! Run away with me!" For a time they were silent as the cab rolled along easily on its rubber tires. "They can wait a long while for you, Ingigerd," Frederick at length said. "To-morrow we shall be with Peter Schmidt in Meriden." But she laughed. Yes, she laughed at him, and Frederick clearly saw he had melted her body, not her soul; or a soul was a thing this girl did not possess. The cab came to a halt in front of the club-house. Frederick seemed to have lost his speech. Without saying a word, he escorted Ingigerd to the door, pressed her hand, and returned to the cab. He chose a place at random, and called to the coachman to drive him there. XII Frederick crouched in a corner of the cab. In a passion of shame, he called himself the vilest names. He removed his slouched hat, which he had not yet replaced by the New York chimney-pot, wiped the sweat from his brow, and beat his fist against his forehead. "My poor father! Within a month, I shall probably be no more nor less than the official kept man of a prostitute. Everybody will know me and pay homage to me. Every German barber in New York will tell his patrons who my father is, and who I am, and what I live by, and whom I am running after. I shall become that worthless little fiend's lap dog, her monkey to perform tricks for her, her procurer. The German colonies in every city, large or small, that we visit will behold in me a typical example of the loathsome degree to which a scion of the German nobility can sink, into what a cesspool of vice a man who was once a good man, husband, and father can descend."