"Good God!" shrieked Bertha, shaking the prostrate man violently, "the whole property? tell me, the whole property? Oh, you miserable man, what folly to fall into such spasms! Speak, and tell me whether we have nothing at all, or what we have!" Leuthold slowly raised his head. Bertha carried, more than supported, him to the sofa. She brought some eau-de-cologne and poured it over his head so that it ran into his eyes. He uttered an exclamation of pain, and tried to wipe away the burning fluid from his eyes. "Are you trying to deprive me of my eyesight?" he groaned, and, when the pain was relieved, he sat in a dejected attitude, staring into vacancy. "For mercy's sake, speak!" cried Bertha. "You can, at least, open your mouth. No legacy? Not an annuity?" Leuthold looked at his unfeeling wife with an expression that, in spite of herself, drove the blood to her cheeks. There was something indescribable in the look,--a mixture of the pity and contempt with which one contemplates the body of a suicide. "An annuity of six hundred thalers," he murmured, and covered his eyes with his hand, as if to shut out everything around him while he collected his scattered senses. "Too much to die upon, and too little to live upon!" moaned Bertha, and, bursting into tears, she threw herself upon a chair in the farthest corner of the room. Leuthold sat motionless for a long time, his face hidden in his hands; he scarcely seemed to breathe. He appeared to need all his physical strength to assist him to endure the mental agony which was overpowering him,--to have no strength left to stir a limb. The man of feeling tries to master his unhappiness by raging and lamenting,--he combats his agony by physical exertion,--he rushes hither and thither, beats his head against the wall, wrings his hands, and lessens his woe in a degree by a certain amount of muscular activity. The man of intellect struggles mentally, and stands in need of entire physical repose. Such a man as Leuthold could only for a moment be excited to violence against the hated cause of his misfortune; he soon regained his exterior composure, and his misery became an intellectual labour, which might produce loss of reason, and was never-ceasing. He sat lost in a profound reverie. Now and then, like lightning across a cloud, some idea of help in his misery flashed across his brain, but it vanished as soon as it appeared, leaving each time a blacker night in his soul.