"Unhappy man," he says to the Schoolmaster, "the hour of your repentance has not yet sounded. God only knows when it will strike. The punishment of your crimes is still incomplete; you have suffered, but not expiated. Destiny follows out its work of full justice. Your accomplices have become your tormentors. A woman, a child, tame, subdue, conquer you. When I sentenced you to a terrible punishment for your crimes I said--do you remember my words?--'You have wickedly abused the great bodily strength bestowed upon you; I will paralyse that strength. The strongest have trembled before you; I will make you henceforward shrink in the presence of the weakest of beings.' You have left the obscure retreat in which you might have dwelt for repentance and expiation. You were afraid of silence and solitude. You sought to drown remembrance by new crimes. Just now, in a fearful and bloodthirsty access of passion, you have wished to kill your wife. She is here under the same roof as yourself. She sleeps without defence. You have a knife. Her apartment is close at hand. There was nothing to prevent you from reaching her. Nothing could have protected her from your rage--nothing but your impotence. The dream you have had, and in which you are still bound, may teach you much, may save you. The mysterious phantoms of this dream bear with them a most pregnant meaning. The lake of blood, in which your victims have appeared, is the blood you have shed. The molten lava which replaced it is the gnawing, eating remorse, which must consume you before one day, that the Almighty, having mercy on your protracted tortures, shall call you to himself, and let you taste the ineffable sweetness of his gracious forgiveness. But this will not be. No, no! these warnings will be useless. Far from repenting, you regret every day, with horrid blasphemies, the time when you could commit such atrocities. Alas! from this continual struggle between your bloodthirsty desires and the impossibility of satisfying them,--between your habits of fierce oppression and the compulsion of submitting to beings as weak as they are depraved,--there will result to you a fate so fearful, so appalling. Ah, unhappy wretch!" Rodolph's voice faltered, and for a moment he was silent, as if emotion and horror had hindered him from proceeding. The Schoolmaster's hair bristled on his brow. What could be--would be--that fate, which even his executioner pitied? "The fate that awaits you is so horrible," resumed Rodolph, "that, if the Almighty, in his inexorable and all-powerful vengeance, would make you in your person expiate all the crimes of all mankind, he could not devise a more fearful punishment! Ah, woe for you! woe for you!" At this moment the Schoolmaster uttered a piercing shriek, and awoke with a bound at this horrid, frightful dream. CHAPTER IX. THE LETTER.