"After this we can be nothing more to each other," he began; and it seemed as if every word fell from his lips into her heart like molten lead. He took breath, as if after some violent physical exertion, and then continued: "I do not answer the accusations with which you have overwhelmed my mother and myself. They grieve me for your sake. They are unworthy of your nobler self. I have treated you as I was compelled to do by my sense of honour. I have told you what was, according to my profoundest convictions, indispensable to the happiness of marriage. That you refuse,--that you can refuse me the sacrifice I ask of you,--proves to me that you do not love me. This is what separates us. And I pray you to remember that, as I sacredly believe, it is the duty of a man to convince himself that the woman whom he seeks to marry is fitted to be the mother of his children; and your heart is not yet open to the wide, self-forgetting affection that can alone suffice to enable a woman to undertake the hard duties of a wife and mother. Will it ever be thus open? Who can tell? Another may one day reap in joy what I have sown in pain. I do not reproach you,--how could I?" He laid his hand upon her head, his eyes were for one moment suffused. As he looked at her, grief had the mastery, and he was silent. She was crushed beneath his gaze, her artificial composure forsook her, a cry escaped her lips. She now first began to perceive what she had done, and her heart shrunk from the burden that she had laid upon it, although she did not as yet dream of its weight. Johannes gently smoothed her hair from her brow. Her agitation restored his self-control. "You are kind, Ernestine,--you see how you have hurt me, and you are sorry for me. It is the way with women. This little weakness does you honour in my eyes. I pray you be composed. I am quite calm again." He would have withdrawn his hand, but she held it fast and looked up at him with those eyes of sad entreaty that had worked such magic upon him when she was a child. "Do not utterly forsake me!" she whispered in half-stifled accents. "No, as truly as I trust my God will not forsake me, I will not forsake you. I will not shun you like a coward, who, to make renunciation easy and to learn forgetfulness, turns his back upon the good he cannot attain. You need a friend who can protect you, placed as you are with regard to your uncle and the world. This friend I will be to you, until you find a worthier. Do not fear that you will hear another word of love, or of regret. I will conquer my grief alone. My one care shall be for your happiness. Farewell, and when you have need of me send for me." He pressed her hands once more, and turned away without another word. Ernestine looked after him as he receded from her gaze. She looked and looked until he turned a corner and vanished. Then she sank on her knees and cried in an outburst of anguish, "Have I really had the strength to do this?"