Oswald also had frequently suffered from this difficulty; it had spoilt many of his pleasures, it had made him dislike many good people and bad musicians, it threatened even now to become fatal to his love. Not long ago he had made the terrible discovery in his own heart that treachery was lurking there when he thought it altogether filled with love. He had excused himself, it is true, as to the scene in the bay-window at Barnewitz, by saying: I was beside myself; I did not know what I was doing--but can jealousy ever be an excuse for faithlessness? And then: Was that jealousy at least perfectly dead now? Had it not blazed up again in bright flames when he found Melitta's image behind the curtain in the baron's room? Had he not listened to Melitta's recital with breathless apprehension, ever fearing lest now a fact might come out which would after all confirm his suspicions about that man--lest she might, after all, have loved this remarkable man, perhaps without knowing it herself? Had she not said: "I thought I loved him!" And at the very moment when her story had reached the catastrophe which was to explain everything, even her evident antipathy to Oldenburg at this time--just then a message is brought of such a strange and weird nature that it ends in upsetting Oswald's overwrought mind! It was not enough, that he had in Baron Oldenburg a rival facing him in bodily presence; he must now encounter, besides, a husband, or at least the ghost of a husband, who rises from a night of insanity that has lasted seven years, to beckon her to his dying bed--her, his beloved, his Melitta! Oswald felt as if his own mind would give way were he to follow out this thought. He had so completely forgotten that Melitta had ever been married, that she had ever lain in the arms of another man, it mattered little whether she had loved him or not--that she had ever accepted his caresses--he crushed her letter, he could have cried aloud with pain, he felt like dashing his head against the rocky cliffs. Why this poison in the cup of his love? Why must the pure garments of his angel be dragged through the mire of vulgar life? Why must a foul worm have been gnawing at the beautiful flower? And if she were only free now! But even when the night of insanity was to be swallowed up in the night of death, she would not be free yet. She is the mother of her child, of his child, and this consideration, forgotten for the moment, will resume its place in the foreground, and she will have to give me up! And yet, why should it not be so? Can I, the enthusiast for liberty, ever marry the aristocrat? Can I dream of intruding upon a class of men who will ever look at me askant? No! No! Rather live like these poor fishermen, who must earn their daily bread at the risk of their lives in their strife with the cruel ocean.