"I know well that his reasoning was strained and unsound; but there was a kernel of truth in it. The result has proven this; the incredibly vapid, idealess time in which we live, a time barren of thought and of deeds, a real age of the Epigoni, has completely confirmed his prediction. And now again he wandered, a homeless adventurer, through the land, only with the difference that before with insolent power he had sported with men, whom he now coldly preyed upon because he despised them. 'I endeavored to purchase with my blood a letter of indulgence for my past: it has been refused me. What now is the present or the future to me?' How often have I thought upon this expression of his to me at the moment of our parting. It has always remained with me a key to his enigmatical character. "Again for years I heard nothing more of him. Our father was dead; our estate sequestered; my second brother, Arthur, whom his aunt had deceived in his expectations, was toiling in thankless public service; I, who had set my heart upon the regeneration of the public, and thought that I could see that the work must be begun at the very beginning, that is, at the bottom, had managed to obtain this place through my patron, Altenburg; had been here, a crippled man, for four years, and was still studying the rudiments of my vocation; Malte was nowhere heard of. Suddenly he reappeared, and with a wife who had followed the adventurer to his home. He declared his intention to take the paternal estate in hand. I afforded him every facility; Arthur sold his rights for a sum of money, the receipt of which, by the way, he still denies. The creditors were glad to get at all events something, and one of them at least consoled himself with the thought that 'omittance was no quittance,' and the hope--which has not deceived him--that the Zehren estates were as secure to him under the new master as under the old. "We did not meet at his return; just at that time I could not well leave this place, and he, on his part, felt no desire to renew the old friendship. When we parted, I was about to contract a marriage, in which the first-born of an ancient line saw a criminal _mésalliance_; now for some years I had been holding an official post; and to hold any post, but especially such a post as this, was in his eyes throwing one's self away, trampling under foot the inborn right of a knight of the hammer, and making one's self a plebeian anvil. That I refused the compensation he had offered me for my interest in the estate, wounded him deeply. By so doing, in his eyes, I renounced my obedience and subordination to the first-born, the chief of the family. He could not forgive me that I had no more need of him; that I had no debts which he must plunge himself into debt to pay; in a word, that I was not like my brother Arthur, who was much more compliant in this point--too compliant, I fear.