Karl Metzerott allowed no hands but his own to touch the body of his son; and, when the blood had been washed from the cold form, it was the father alone who dressed it in the well-kept “Sunday suit,” and brushed back the fair hair from the white temples. Then he sat down beside the bed, dumbly despairing. His clothes, of a rough brown cloth, were stiff with patches of dark red, his hands were stained of the same fatal color, his rugged face was set, his eyes dull and glassy. “Do I need to be told that I cannot keep him long?” he asked bitterly; “then let me keep him while I can; and leave me, all of you, let me be alone with my dead.” For a night, a day, and then another night, without food or sleep, motionless, silent, brooding over thoughts too terrible for words, he sat there. Forever, forever parted, never, nevermore to meet again. The gentle, strong, loving heart still forever, the blue eyes nevermore to read the secret of another’s sorrow, the busy hands folded uselessly on the wounded breast. Ah! that wound had not been useless; it had dispersed the mob more quickly than a hundred cannon. Once and again, as the light flickered over the still features, he started forward, full of the wild thought that they had moved;—only to fall back the next moment into the blackness of a bitterer despair. Dead, dead, body and soul, forever, forever, dead, dead! In the dawn of the second morning there was a hand upon the lock, and the voice of Ernest Clare begged for admittance. With the sense that, of all men, this man he not merely dreaded but feared to see, the shoemaker’s spirit rose up bravely to defy this fear. He unbarred the door and stood aside for the guest to enter. He was prepared for grief, it was natural that any one should love his boy; and preaching he was ready to defy; but he had not anticipated the look of sorrowful triumph, as in a dear-bought victory, wherewith the clergyman bent to kiss the pale cold forehead. “It is the death he would have chosen,” he said, turning to the father with almost a smile. Karl Metzerott’s rugged features worked convulsively a moment, then the words burst from his lips as though they rent his heart in the speaking,— “I chose it for him! I killed him!” Ernest Clare turned his eyes aside from beholding the man’s agony; it was all he could do. “I hate you,” continued the rough voice, harsh with grief; “yet, if I had followed your counsel, my boy would be now alive. The vengeance which I would have brought upon the guilty has lighted on the head of the innocent; yet you would have me believe in a God, who rules and judges the earth!” “Tell me this,” said Ernest Clare, “while a man or woman lives who remembers Louis Metzerott, will there ever be another riot in Micklegard?” “Another!” cried the father, “another! _Allmächtiger Gott!_ ANOTHER!” “You have called upon His name!” said Ernest Clare, “and you have felt His justice! How dare you deny that He _is_.”