He shook and pressed both his friend's hands in the excess of his gratitude, looked upon his situation already in a much more hopeful light, turned the conversation again to the new railway and to the stupendous chances which would come to him in case the decision was favourable, and that it would be so, he suddenly assumed to be probable, nay, certain. He never noticed that Bertram had made the little carriage turn which was waiting for them at the end of the wood, and that now they were driving back the way they had come. The suggested inspection of the factory had only been a pretext for having an undisturbed hour with Bertram. His friend was now sitting in silence by his side. Otto kept on talking to him, lowering his voice on account of the driver's presence. Bertram hardly heard what he said. He hardly saw, either--or if he saw, it was like in a dream--the golden lights flash down through the top of the giant firs, and play around the brown stems and along the mossy ground; he saw but as in a dream the lovely vistas which opened here and there, giving glimpses of loveliest landscape beauty in the valley far below. His busy mind was working and modelling away at the part in the family drama which had, after all, been forced upon him, and which he had not dared to decline--for Erna's sake. VIII. For Erna's sake! How often he repeated that phrase to himself in the course of the day! He wanted nothing for himself. What, indeed, could he have wanted for himself? Nothing more than a man who should see a child lost, in danger, among a crowd of carriages, and who should bound to the spot and carry the child away to some place of safety; nothing more than a wanderer, who sees a fellow-traveller start upon a road of which he knows of old the insecure state, and who warns the heedless man to take some other road instead. One does so because it is one's duty as a human being; one does so because one's heart urges one to do it, because one cannot help doing it. Yes, a man acts and speaks in such situations as he would hardly act or speak for his own sake. He is more courageous or more anxious than he would be, if his own weal or woe were at stake. One grows beyond one's self, or else sinks beneath one's own everyday moral level.