For he had reckoned without his Janko, always at hand to cover up a scandal. The Will he had breathed into Helene had been exhausted in the one supreme effort of her life. Sucked up again into the family egotism, kept for weeks under a _régime_ of terror and intercepted letters, hurried away from Geneva; chagrined and outraged, too, by her lover's incomprehensible repudiation of her, which only success could have excused, and which therefore became more unpardonable as day followed day without rescue from a giant, proved merely windbag; she fell back with compunction into the tender keeping of the ever-waiting Janko. The one letter her father permitted her to send formally announced her eternal love and devotion for her former _fiancé_. Profitless to tell the story of how the stricken giant, raving in outer darkness, this Polyphemus who had gouged out his own eye, this Hercules self-invested in the poisoned robe of Nessus, moved heaven and earth to see her again. It was an earthquake, a tornado, a nightmare. He had frenzies of tears, his nights were sleepless reviews of his folly in throwing her away, and vain phantasms of her eyes and lips. He poured out torrents of telegrams and letters, in which cries of torture mingled with minute legal instructions. The correspondence of the Working-Men's Union alone was neglected. He pressed everybody and anybody into his feverish service--musicians, artists, soldiers, antiquarians, aristocrats. Would not Wagner induce the King of Bavaria to speak to von Dönniges? Would not the Catholic Bishop Ketteler help him?--he would become a Catholic. And ever present an insane belief in the reality of her faithlessness, mockingly accompanied by a terribly lucid recognition of the instability of character that made it certain. The "No"--her first word to him at their first meeting--resounded in his ears, prophetically ominous. The sunrise, hidden by rain and mist, added its symbolic gloom. But he felt her lips on his in the marvellous moonlight; a thousand times she clung to him crying, "Take me away!" And now she was to be another's. She refused even to see him. Incredible! Monstrous! If he could only get an interview with her face to face. Then they would see if she was resisting him of her own free will or under pressure illegal for an adult. It was impossible his will-power over her should fail. Helene evidently thought so too. By fair means and foul, by spies and lawyers and friendly agents, Lassalle's frenzied energy had penetrated through every defence to the inmost entrenchment where she sat cowering. He had exacted the father's consent to an interview. Only Helene's own consent was wanting. His friend Colonel Rustow brought the sick Hercules the account of her refusal--a refusal which made ridiculous his moving of mountains. "But surely you owe Lassalle some satisfaction," he had protested. "To what? To his wounded vanity?" It was the last straw.