_John._ And hence you conclude that we must part. _Miss Mahr._ I did not mean to speak of ourselves. But it is as you say ... we must part. Another idea ... had sometimes suggested itself to me too ... momentarily. But I could not entertain it now. I too have felt as if it were the presentiment of better things. And since then the old aim seems to me too poor a one for us--too common, to tell the truth. It is like coming down from the mountain-top with its wide, free view, and feeling the narrowness, the nearness of everything in the valley. Those who feel the narrow, stifling atmosphere must either die or leave. _Anna Mahr_ is not made for the valley. She must live on the heights. But _John Vockerat_, harassed and whipped on by those who love him most, is unmanned, broken and crushed. He clings to _Anna Mahr_ as one condemned to death. _John._ Help me, Miss Anna! There is no manliness, no pride left in me. I am quite changed. At this moment I am not even the man I was before you came to us. The one feeling left in me is disgust and weariness of life. Everything has lost its worth to me, is soiled, polluted, desecrated, dragged through the mire. When I think what you, your presence, your words made me, I feel that if I cannot be that again, then--then all the rest no longer means anything to me. I draw a line through it all and--_close my account_. _Miss Mahr._ It grieves me terribly, Dr. Vockerat, to see you like this. I hardly know how I am to help you. But one thing you ought to remember--that we foresaw this. We knew that we must be prepared for this sooner or later. _John._ Our prophetic feeling of a new, a free existence, a far-off state of blessedness--that feeling we will keep. It shall never be forgotten, though it may never be realized. It shall be my guiding light; when this light is extinguished, my life will be extinguished too. _Miss Mahr._ John! one word more! This ring--was taken from the finger of a dead woman, who had followed her--her husband to Siberia--and faithfully shared his suffering to the end. Just the opposite to our case.... It is the only ring I have ever worn. Its story is a thing to think of when one feels weak. And when you look at it--in hours of weakness--then--think of her--who, far away--lonely like yourself--is fighting the same secret fight--Good-bye! But John lacks the strength for the fight. Life to him is too lonely, too empty, too unbearably desolate. He has to die--a suicide. * * * * * What wonderful grasp of the deepest and most hidden tones of the human soul! What significance in the bitter truth that those who struggle for an ideal, those who attempt to cut themselves loose from the old, from the thousand fetters that hold them down, are doomed to lonely lives!