"In that of my grandfather, who can, perhaps, forget for a few moments that he is also my general. Fear nothing; it is the first time that I ever called you thus, and it will be the last. For me there are no tender or sacred associations with the name. My mother died in misery and want, in agony and despair, but she never once opened her lips to ask aid of him who could have saved both her child and herself by a word. She knew her father." "Yes, she knew him," said Steinrück, sternly. "When she fled from her father's house to be the wife of an adventurer she knew that every tie binding her to her home was severed, that there could be no return, and no reconciliation. Will her son presume to condemn the severity of an outraged father?" "No," replied Michael; "I know that my mother openly defied you, that she had forfeited her home, and that if the father's heart was silent, and only his sense of justice spoke, he could not but repudiate her. But I know, also, that her worst crime lay in her following a bourgeois adventurer. Had he been her equal in rank, the prodigal, debauched son of some noble family, she would not have been so irrevocably condemned, her father's arms would have been opened to her in her misery, and her son would not now have had his father's memory cast up to him as a disgrace. I should have inherited an ancient name; all else would have been carefully suppressed. Most assuredly I should not have been consigned to the hands of a Wolfram, that I might go to ruin." The general's eyes flashed, but he gave up treating the young officer any longer as a stranger; he now spoke angrily, but it was to a grandson: "Not another word, Michael! I am not accustomed to be thus addressed. Of what do you dare to accuse me?" "Of what I can vouch for, for it is the truth," declared Michael, returning the Count's look of menace. "It would have been easy for you to place the orphaned boy in some remote educational establishment, where you never would have seen or heard of him, but where at least he might have been made fit for something in life; but this was just what must not be. Therefore I was exiled to a lonely forest, where, with only rude and rough companionship, blows and hard words were all the instruction I received; where all intellectual aspiration was suppressed, all talent ignored, and the only aim was to make of me a rude, ignorant boor, whose life was to be wasted in the depths of the forest. A stranger hand snatched me from that misery. I owe my education, the social position in which I now confront you, to a stranger. To my near relatives I should have owed only intellectual death."