The mood in which Conte Capriani took his place beside Kilary in the victoria that was to carry him to the place of meeting, was a very strange one. Never had he felt such pride of victory; his thoughts reverted to his first meeting with the beautiful Countess Lodrin at the beginning of his career, when with his keen scent for all that was lowest in human beings, he had divined her passionate nature, a nature held in check with despotic resolution after the great disappointment of her early life. With calculating cunning he had plotted and schemed to get her into his power. But when at last he thought he had quelled and broken her pride, she suddenly reared her head more haughtily than ever, and thrust him from her.--He had not believed such audacity possible! And now the woman whom he had thought to tread beneath his feet stood at so unattainable a height above him, that his treachery was of no avail as a weapon against her. How his heart had been consumed by futile rage! Only the day before yesterday she had dared to send him word by Zoe Melkweyser that she did not remember him. "But it is my turn now," he thought, "this duel has forced an explanation between herself and Oswald,--she has had to humble herself before her child!" A fiendish exultation thrilled him to his very finger-tips. "At last they must bow before me," he said to himself.--"Mother and son, the two haughtiest of the whole haughty crowd!" It never occurred to him that this explanation which he had forced so relentlessly upon the mother and son could have results other than those which he contemplated. Absolutely content, for the first time in his life, he leaned back among the cushions slowly puffing forth big clouds of smoke into the fresh morning air, as the carriage approached the old monastery of St. Elizabeth. It was a large building blackened by time, standing quite isolated at about half a league from Tornow upon fallow land. Formerly a monastery, afterwards a hospital, and then a poor-house, it was now one of those melancholy ruins that only await the pickaxe of demolition. The walls were dirty, the windows black, with half the panes broken and patched up with paper.--Two grape-vines trailed over the grass where once had been a garden, and a couple of knotty mulberry-trees grew close to the ruinous walls. Leaning against one of these walls stood an ancient black, wooden crucifix; the nail that had held fast the right hand of The Crucified had fallen out and the arm hung loose, lending to the rudely-carved image a strange reality. It looked as if the Saviour in the death struggle had torn away his bleeding hand from the cross to bless mankind with it once more. Beneath the figure of Christ was a tablet with an inscription, the gilt letters of which, much faded by time, still glistened in the morning sunlight.