"He dare not?" repeated Hugo. "You know men but little, and your own husband least of all. Do not trust too much to the right which the Church gave you; even this power has its limits, and I fear Reinhold already stands beyond them. To be sure, you have no conception of that burning fiendish passion, which enchains and makes a man powerless--so surrounds him with its bonds, that for its sake he forgets and sacrifices everything. Signora Biancona is one of those demonlike natures which can inspire such passions, and here she is connected with everything which makes up Reinhold's life--with music, art and imagination. Nor Church nor marriage can protect, if the wife cannot protect herself. You are wife, and mother of his child. Perhaps he will listen to your voice, when he will to nothing else." The young wife's heavily-drawn breath showed how much she suffered, and two tears, the first, rolled slowly down her cheeks as she replied, almost inaudibly, "I will try it." Hugo came close to her side. "I know I have thrown a lighted brand into the family to-day, which will, perhaps, destroy the last remains of peace," he said, earnestly. "Hundreds of wives would now rush despairingly to their parents, so as, with them or alone, to call their husbands to account, and cause a scene which would break the last bond, and drive him irretrievably from the house. You will not do this, Ella; I know it, therefore I dared do with you what I should not have ventured on so easily with any other woman. What you may say to Reinhold--what you may insist upon, rests with yourself; but do not let him leave you now; do not let him go to Italy!" He ceased, and seemed to expect an answer--in vain; Ella sat there, her face buried in her hands. She hardly moved as he said good-bye to her. The young Captain saw that she must overcome the blow alone, so he went. When, half-an-hour later, Reinhold returned from the office, he saw the bouquet of roses lying on the writing-table in his own room, and took it up under the firm impression that Jonas had put it there. In the meanwhile Ella sat in her child's room and waited, not for a farewell from her husband, she had not been used to such tendernesses ever since her marriage; but she knew he never left the house without first going to see his boy. The wife felt only too well that she herself was nothing to her husband, that her only value for him lay in the child; she felt that the love for his child was the only point by which she could approach his heart, and therefore she waited here for him in order to hold the terribly difficult and painful interview. He must surely come; but to-day she had to wait in vain. Reinhold did not come. For the first time he forgot the farewell kiss on his child's brow--forgot the last and only bond which chained him to his home. In his heart there was only room now for one thought, and that was Beatrice Biancona.