"These damned Manichæans!" muttered Ottomar. He did not understand the connection; the next note was not due for eight days--but what else could it be? His father would make another beautiful scene for him! Oh, pshaw! He would get engaged a few days earlier, if he must get engaged, if it were only finally to put an end to the disgraceful worries from which he had no rest at night in his room, and couldn't smoke his cigar in peace! He threw his cigar out of the window; August had taken his uniform and removed the cotillion favors. "What's that for?" "Does the Lieutenant prefer to put on his uniform?" asked August. "Nonsense!" said Ottomar. "That was just lacking to----" He broke off; for he could not tell August--to make the tedious story still more tedious and more serious. "I shall simply explain to Papa that in the future I do not intend to molest him further with such things, and prefer to have my affairs finally arranged by Wallbach," he said to himself, while August went on ahead with the light--the gas lights in the hall were already extinguished--down the hall, and now stopped at his father's door. "You may put the light on the table there, and as far as I am concerned, go to bed, and tell Friedrich to wake me at six o'clock in the morning." He had spoken these words more loudly than was necessary, and he noticed that his voice had a strange sound--as if it were not his own voice. It was, of course, only because everything was so still in the house--so still that he now heard the blood coursing in his temples and his heart beating. "The damned Manichæans!" he muttered again through his teeth, as he knocked at the door. "Come in!" His father stood at his desk, above which a hanging lamp was burning. And the lamps were still burning on the brackets before the mirror, there was an uncanny brightness in the room, and an uncanny order, although it was just exactly as Ottomar had seen it as long as he could remember. He ought really to have put on his uniform after all. "I beg pardon, Papa, for coming in négligé. I was just about to go to bed, and August was so insistent----" His father still stood at the desk, resting one hand on it, turning his back to him without answering. The silence of his father lay like a mountain on Ottomar's soul. He shook off with a violent effort the sullen hesitation. "What do you want, Papa?" "First, to ask you to read this letter," said the General, turning around slowly and pointing with his finger to a sheet which lay open before him on his desk. "A letter to me!" "Then I should not have read it; but I have read it." He had stepped back from the desk, and was going up and down the room with a slow, steady step, his hands behind him, while Ottomar, in the same place where his father had stood without taking the sheet in his hands--the handwriting was clear enough--read: "Highly Honored and Respected General: