I am promoted!----Melchior, I am promoted! Oh, I don't care what happens now!----I am promoted!----Who would have believed that I should be promoted!----I don't realize it yet!----I read it twenty times!----I couldn't believe it----Good Lord, it's so!----It's so; I am promoted! (_Laughing._) I don't know----I feel so queer----the ground turns around----Melchior, Melchior, can you realize what I've gone through? HANS RILOW. I congratulate you, Moritz----Only be happy that you got away with it! MORITZ. You don't know, Hans, you can't guess, what depends on it. For three weeks I've slunk past that door as if it were a hellish abyss. To-day I saw it was ajar. I believe that if some one had offered me a million----nothing, oh nothing, could have held me.----I stood in the middle of the room,--I opened the report book----ran over the leaves----found----and during all that time----I shudder---- MELCHIOR. ----During all that time? MORITZ. During all that time the door behind me stood wide open. How I got out----how I came down the steps, I don't know. HANS RILOW. Is Ernest Röbel promoted, too? MORITZ. Oh, certainly, Hans, certainly!----Ernest Röbel is promoted, too. ROBERT. Then you can't have read correctly. Counting in the dunce's stool, we, with you and Robert, make sixty-one, and the upper class-room cannot accommodate more than sixty. MORITZ. I read it right enough. Ernest Röbel is given as high a rating as I am--both of us have conditions to work off.----During the first quarter it will be seen which of us has to make room for the other. Poor Röbel!----Heaven knows, I'm not afraid of myself any longer. I've looked into it too deeply this time for that. OTTO. I bet five marks that you lose your place. MORITZ. You haven't anything. I won't rob you.----Lord, but I'll grind from to-day on!----I can say so now----whether you believe it or not----It's all the same now----I----I know how true it is; if I hadn't been promoted I would have shot myself. ROBERT. Boaster! GEORGE. Coward! OTTO. I'd like to see you shoot yourself! LAEMMERMEIER. Box his ears. MELCHIOR. (_Gives him a cuff._) Come, Moritz, let's go to the forester's house! GEORGE. Do you believe his nonsense? MELCHIOR. What's that to you? Let them chatter, Moritz! Come on, let's go to town. (_Professors Hungergurt and Knochenbruch pass by._) KNOCHENBRUCH. It is inexplicable to me, my dear colleague, how the best of my scholars can fail the very worst of all. HUNGERGURT. To me, also, professor. SCENE FIFTH. _A sunny afternoon--Melchior and Wendla meet each other in the wood._ MELCHIOR. Is it really you, Wendla?----What are you doing up here all alone?----For three hours I've been going from one side of the wood to the other without meeting a soul, and now you come upon me out of the thickest part of it! WENDLA.