What was he to do? Should he expose himself to the perhaps very ignoble vengeance of the young noblemen? Should he enter the lists without knowing anything of the weapons, the witnesses, the place, or even his adversaries? Could any fair-minded man blame him if he took no notice of the challenge of an anonymous writer? But he probably had not to deal with fair-minded men. Had he not already found out, and seen it proved by his experience, that in these privileged circles the pleasure of the individual stood for right, and the most frivolous whim of the moment served as a motive for action? Had he not found this to be so even in the two characters which were so far above the common mass, in Melitta and Oldenburg? And would they not charge him, if he declined the challenge, with want of that delicate sense of honor of which these nobles were so proudly boasting? No, no; he must take up the gauntlet, however contemptible the hand might be that had thrown it down in the dark. He must show these young noblemen that he was not afraid to meet their revenge alone, friendless, and unarmed. His blood was boiling. He walked up and down in his room in great excitement. "Come on! Come on!" he hissed through his teeth. "I wish they would place themselves one by one opposite to me; my hatred would give me strength to overthrow them all. Quite right! Quite right! What have I to do here among these wolves? To be torn or to tear. I ought to have foreseen that." Oswald felt how a new evil spirit rose from the deepest bottom of his soul, which his eye had never yet fathomed. A wild passion, a burning thirst for revenge, a mad desire to destroy seized upon him; it was the intense, frantic hatred of the nobility which he had felt as a boy, while he loaded the pistols for his father behind the city wall, when the latter shot at the ace of spades and each time aimed at the heart of a noble man; when he read at school, in Livy, of the haughty arrogance of the Tarquins, or in his room, of the tearful story of Emilia Galotti. And they were no fictions! Here, in this castle, perhaps in these same rooms which he now occupied, a victim of the cruelty of a nobleman had bled to death; here the poor, unhappy, and beautiful Marie had paid with a thousand burning tears for her folly in believing the word of a noble tempter. She had been victimized because she was a frail woman, and because she had no weapons but tears--tears which found no pity. Those tears had never been atoned for. How if he should arise as her avenger--if he should avenge those tears of a low-born maid in the blood of a nobleman?