"There is no help for either of us," said Ottomar, "it has all crumbled away bit by bit; and we are hanging with our roots in the air. The stone that would gladly have held us up cannot do it; rather the reverse. And if there come one great storm, such as this, we must both fall. I wish to God we lay there, and that you would fall upon my head and kill me, and that the flood would come and wash us out to sea, and no one should know how we came to our end." And she? She, whom he had just left in the miserable, dreary inn-room, she, whose kisses he still felt upon his lips, and who, as he went out at the door--thinking, no doubt, that he could not see her--threw herself upon the sofa, and leaning her head upon the back covered her face with her hands, weeping he was certain. For what? for her miserable fate that bound her to a man weaker than herself. She was strong, she would endure it all, come what would. But what could come for her? She had repeated to him a hundred times on the road, that he was not to trouble himself any more about that miserable money; that her father was far too proud to refuse her entreaty, the first she had made to him since she could remember, the last that she would ever make to him. And she had written to her father from Neuenfähr, where they had had to wait half an hour for the carriage. "The thing is done," she had said, as she stroked his hair from his forehead as a mother might have done to her boy, who had been playing truant from school. She was the stronger; but then what did she lose? her father?--she seemed never to have really loved him; her comfortable life in her beautiful luxurious home?--what does a girl know of the things that make up her life!--her art? that she could carry with her everywhere; had she not said with a smile, "It will support us both." Of course! she would have to support him now, the disgraced soldier! The fir-tree, against which he leaned, creaked and groaned like some tormented creature; Ottomar could feel how the roots heaved and twisted, and the soil showered down the steep gorge, while in the branches the wind whistled and howled and crackled like grape-shot or musketry fire, and from the sea came a roar and thunder as if from an endless line of batteries, whose fire was incessantly kept up. "It would have been so simple then," said Ottomar; "my father would have paid my few debts and would have been proud of me, instead of sending me a pistol now, as if I did not know as well as he that it is all over for Ottomar von Werben; and Elsa would have often and lovingly talked of her brother, who fell at Vionville. Dear Elsa, how I should like to see her once more!"