Reinhold had, notwithstanding, followed the impulse of his heart, and attempted the impossible. He had been, for the first time since they had been together, harshly repulsed by his uncle, and had been forced to own to himself that neither he nor any other man could persuade the fiery-tempered old man to retract a decision once made "because he must." But when Aunt Rikchen, unable to rest from fear of the terrible _something_ in the air which yet she could not comprehend, found Ferdinanda an hour later lying senseless on the floor of her studio; when the unfortunate girl was raving in high fever, and the family doctor came and went with anxious looks, and soon returned in company with a colleague, and in the evening the two were joined by a third physician, who seemed no less helpless before this strange seizure--then, when Reinhold's first words, "It will kill her!" seemed likely to be so terribly soon fulfilled, he bethought himself of the General's fervent prayer that God might guide his uncle's heart, and sought his uncle, who had not left his room again since the morning, and asked him whether he would really allow his child to die when it was in his power to save her. "I am convinced that you can save her," he cried; "that a word from you would pierce to her troubled mind through all the horrors of a fevered fancy, and that she would awake to a new life." "And what would that word be?" asked Uncle Ernst. "If your heart does not tell you, you would not understand it if I spoke it." "My heart only tells me that it would be a lie," replied Uncle Ernst; "and as I understand life, no lie will restore it. What life would it be to which she would awake! Life at the side of a man whose courage holds out just so long as the darkness in which he has followed his course of intrigue; who only steps forth from that darkness when a villain tears off his mask, and he cannot endure his father's eye upon his miserable face; who would do what he must to-day, driven on by the reproaches of his conscience and fear of the world's opinion, only to repent it tomorrow from the same fear, and to hint it to her at first in a thousand different ways, and say it at last to her face. Is that a lot for a father to prepare for his child? No, never! Better a thousand times death, if she must needs die. Every man has his own way of looking at life, and this is mine; and no general officer, with I know not what confused ideas of honour and love, and no relation, however dear he may be to me, who in his good-nature would like to accommodate what never can be put straight, will ever teach me another. And if God Himself came and said to me, 'You are wrong,' I should answer, 'I do right in my own eyes,' and no God can demand more of man." "But you ought not to have urged Ferdinanda to a decision which cannot possibly have come from her heart." "Are not you attempting something of the same kind at this moment?"