"I thank you," he said very gently, "I thank you from the bottom of my heart for so much goodness, and to deserve it will be the fairest task of my life. But pray do not condemn Herr von Waldor. It is impossible to measure him by the common standard. Contempt of death and greed of life, princely generosity and petty egotism, tenderest love and bitterest hatred--all these things lie side by side in his soul, and cross and re-cross each other in such a way that even to me (and I think I know him better than any one else) it is a perfect enigma. But if at times I cannot solve it all, if in this present case I cannot but see that he is willing--I must not say to sacrifice, but to stake--me and my happiness in the hope of gaining his own great stakes, then I need only remember what he has been to the orphaned boy, after he had carried my father, fatally wounded, upon his own shoulders out of the bloody struggle around the fortifications of Düppel; how he, of all men the most impatient, has watched over me with a mother's loving patience when I have been ill; how he resumed his studies in order to be able to supervise and guide mine; how he paid my expenses when I was a cadet; how he equipped and helped the ensign, the young officer; how he pressed upon the poor young man of _bourgeois_ birth abundant help to enable him to hold his own in an expensive and aristocratic regiment; and how he thundered in his wrath when I refused to accept it any longer, as I had learned that he had himself to borrow the needful money at usurer's interest. Surely you will admit that one so deeply indebted to Herr von Waldor as I am, has lost the right, nay, more, the ability to struggle and resist, even if the hand which has done so much in the way of kindness weighs heavily, terribly so, upon him." "I think I can follow you in your feelings," replied Bertram, "although Waldor is by no means thereby excused in my eyes; on the contrary, I adhere firmly to the Scriptural saying, that the right hand should not know what the left does; and I hold that he who claims gratitude has already his reward. Moreover, was the sacrifice really requisite, which Waldor expected from you, when he put you into this ominous position? From a moral point of view it is a matter of indifference; but I should like, if possible, to be enlightened on this point, which I have not hitherto understood."