The two men stood opposite one another, each measuring the other's strength, like two athletes who are about to fight to the death, and yet cannot resist admiring each other's noble appearance, and thinking that whichever falls will have succumbed to a worthy adversary. And yet the General had all the time the sensation that, strong and powerful as was the man who stood before him, he himself was in that moment the more composed, the calmer, and therefore the stronger. He saw it in the sullen fire that smouldered in the man's eyes, in the trembling of the hand with which he pointed to a chair; he heard it in the deep voice which now said: "I did not expect your visit, General; but it does not surprise me." "I conjectured as much," answered the General; "and it is for that reason that you see me here. I thought that every hour which passed unused by us, would diminish the probability of a friendly arrangement of the affair which brings me to you, as it would leave time for the miserable writer of this letter to spread his poison further and further. May I venture to give you the disagreeable task of reading this document?" "Will you at the same time take the trouble of casting a glance at this production?" The two men exchanged the letters which they had received. That which the General now read with calm attention, ran thus: "This then is the man who dismisses his work-people because they have not kept their word, as he says. Does he then keep his, he whose mouth is always full of the words liberty, equality, and fraternity; and boasts that he alone has held firmly by the old democratic flag of '48, and who now shuts his eyes while his son buys estates and builds palaces with the money he has stolen from honest people, and while his daughter runs after an officer of the Guards, who has a new mistress every six months, and leads the wildest of lives, but who will ultimately make Fräulein Schmidt into Frau von Werben? Or does Herr Schmidt know this? does he wish this? It is not unlike the great man of progress; for to think one thing and speak another, and to speak one thing and act another, has always been the practice of these gentlemen, which they carry on till at last some one finds them out and stops their dirty work, as in this case is resolved by one who is determined to stop at nothing." The General gave back the letter and received his own. "The man does not seem to have thought it necessary to put on any mask with you," said the General, "except in the handwriting." "Which, however, I recognised at the first glance," answered Uncle Ernst; "it is that of a certain Roller, who was for several years overseer at my works, till I was obliged a few days ago to dismiss him for disobedience, under the circumstances to which he alludes at the commencement of his letter."