She sprang away from him, standing straight. "Then," she cried--he would never have dreamed Ernestine's voice could have sounded like that--"I hate the world! I despise it! I will not have anything to do with it! It fooled us--cheated us--_made fun of us_! I'll despise it--fight it"--the words became incoherent, the sobs grew very wild, she sank to the floor, crouching there, her hands clenched, sobbing: "I hate it! Oh how I want to pay it back!" He was long in quieting her, but at last she would listen to him. "Ernestine," he said, his voice almost stern, "if you start out like that you cannot help me. It is to you I look. If you love me, Ernestine, help me not to hate the world. If we hate the world, we have given up. Sweetheart,"--the voice changed on that word--"even yet--even yet in a different way, I want to win. I cannot do it alone. I cannot do it at all, if you hate the world. You are to be my eyes, Ernestine. You are to see the beautiful things for me. You are to make me love them more than I ever did before. You are to be the light--don't you see, sweetheart? And you cannot do it, don't you see you cannot, if your own heart is not right with the world?" She did not answer, but she came back to his arms. Her quick breath told him how hard she was trying. "See your statue up there, liebchen? Remember how you always liked it? What you said about it that night? Oh, Ernestine"--crushing her to him--"help me to grip tight to my broken sword!" CHAPTER XIX INTO THE DARK She was with him as he went then into the dark. She did not fail him in anything: the hand in his, the little strokes of genius in holding his mind, and when they went into the deeps where words were not fitted for utterance she did not fail him in those other things. He knew that as she clung to him with loving arms, so her spirit reached out to him in the demand that it be permitted to sustain. Through the day and through the night she was with him now. There was no time when he could not reach out to find her, no bad dream from which he could not awaken to put his hand upon her and know that she was there. And when, time after time, bitterness rose up to submerge his soul, he could always finally shake it off by thanking God for Ernestine.