The General also had his hand on the door; but when Ottomar had disappeared he drew it back, carried the lamp to the writing-table, and took out a casket in which he kept, amongst other ornaments of little value that had belonged to his dead wife and his mother, the iron rings that his parents had worn during the war of liberation. He took out the rings. "Times have altered," he said, "not improved. What, ah! what has become of your piety, your dutifulness, your chaste simplicity, your holy self-sacrifice? I have honestly endeavoured to emulate you, to be the worthy son of a race that knew no fame but the courage of its men and the virtue of its women. How have I sinned that I should be so punished?" He kissed the rings and laid them in the casket; and took from amongst several miniatures on ivory, one of a beautiful brown-eyed, brown-haired boy about six years old. He gazed long and immovably at it. "The male line of the Werbens would die out with him, and--he was my darling. Perhaps I am punished because I was so unspeakably proud of him." CHAPTER XI. "Why did my brother ring for his coffee at four o'clock!" asked Aunt Rikchen in the kitchen. "I do not know," answered Grollmann. "You never do know anything," said Aunt Rikchen. Grollmann shrugged his shoulders, took the tray on which the second breakfast was prepared for his master and left the room, but came back in a few minutes and set down the tray, as he had taken it away, on the dresser. "Well?" asked Aunt Rikchen irritably, "is it wrong again?" "My master is asleep," said Grollmann. Aunt Rikchen in her astonishment almost dropped the coffee-pot from which she had just poured Reinhold's coffee. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed, "how can my brother sleep at this hour! He has never in his whole life done such a thing before. Is he ill?" "I don't think so," said Grollmann. "Has anything happened this morning?" "This morning, no." "Or yesterday evening?" asked Aunt Rikchen, whose sharp ears had detected the short pause which Grollmann had made between "this morning" and "no." "I suppose so," said Grollmann, staring before him, while the wrinkles in his weather-beaten face seemed to deepen every moment. "Miserable man, tell me at once!" exclaimed Aunt Rikchen, seizing the old man by the arm and shaking him, as if she wished to shake his secret out of him. "I know nothing," said Grollmann, freeing himself; "is the coffee ready for the Captain?" "Why does my nephew want it in his room to-day?" asked Aunt Rikchen. "I don't know," answered Grollmann, slipping away with the coffee, as he had done before with the breakfast-tray. "He is a horrid man," said Aunt Rikchen; "he will be the death of me some day, with his mysteries. He shall tell me when he comes back."