"Suffice it to you that I am convinced, not of your son's innocence, it would be a lie were I to say that, and to-day more than ever we must have the courage to be sternly true to ourselves and to each other, but that he is not more guilty than a combination of unhappy circumstances may make a young man who, in spite of all his apparent knowledge of the world, is absolutely inexperienced, and whose heart, though no longer sinless, is not corrupt, but capable of noble impulses. And, General, if I have made to you, in whom I have always seen the impersonation of the principles most detested and abhorred by me, to you, above whom in my own self-righteousness I stood so high, a confession which has not been easy to my pride; if I have acknowledged that the principle of unbounded liberty and absolute self-dependence when carried to its extreme consequence may lead weaker spirits into error, must so lead them perhaps, as I see my two children erring now, one irrecoverably lost, the other only trembling on the edge of the abyss, into which some mere accident may precipitate her; have you, too, General von Werben, nothing to repent of, nothing to atone for? Have not the narrow fetters of aristocratic and military routine, in which you have tried to confine your son's easily-led disposition, been equally fatal to him? To him who in a freer and lighter atmosphere might have happily and naturally unfolded the bright gifts of his clear understanding, the powers of enjoyment of his warm heart, and who now, compressed and confined by prejudices on all sides, entangled in hopeless contradictions, has gradually accustomed himself to look upon life so completely and entirely as a series of necessary and unavoidable contradictions, that his death at this moment would be only one more? "A terrible and monstrous contradiction. For would it not be one? Death by his own hand, at the moment when that hand is seized by the woman whom this self-condemned suicide--from all that I now hear I am certain of this--loves with all the force of which his heart is capable, and certainly far more than his own life; and this woman, who is not unworthy indeed of such love, says to him in tones which can only come from a loving and despairing heart: 'Live, live! Live for me, to whom you are all! I have left father, and house, and home, to live for you! With you, without hoping for better days! With you, in shame and misery, if need be--with you!'" Uncle Ernst ceased, overpowered by the feelings of his noble, strong heart, choked by the thoughts which surged in his powerfully working mind. The General, who had been sitting in gloomy meditation, raised his sorrow-dimmed eyes. "If need be?--it must be!"