No, death was not the most terrible that could happen. There were more terrible things than that. It was terrible when one had to say to oneself: "You have brought all your suffering on yourself. Why were you not satisfied? Why must you take by force what nature had refused?" It was more terrible when one felt how one's domestic happiness, one's married happiness, love, faith, unity, how all that intimately unites two people was beginning to totter--for did she not feel every day how her husband was getting colder and colder, and that she also treated him with more indifference? Oh, the son, that third person, it was he who parted them. How miserably all her theories about training, influence, about being born in the spirit had been overthrown. Wolfgang was not the child in which she and her husband were united in body and soul--he was and would remain of alien blood. And he had an alien soul. Poor son! All at once a discerning compassion shot up in the heart of the woman, who for days, weeks, months, even years, had felt nothing but bitterness and mortification, ay, many a time even something like revolt against the one who thus disturbed her days. How could she be so very angry with him, who was not bound to his parents' house by a hundred ties? It was not _his_ parents' house, that was just the point. Maybe he unconsciously felt that the soil there was not his native soil--and now he was seeking, wandering. Kate pondered, her head resting heavily in her hand: what was she to do first? Should she confess to him where he came from? Tell him everything? Perhaps things would be better then. But oh, it was so difficult. But it must be done. She must not remain silent any longer. She felt her trembling heart grow stronger, as she made the firm resolve to speak to him when he returned home. What she had kept as the greatest secret, what she had guarded with trembling, what nothing could have torn from her, as she thought, she was now prepared to reveal of her own free will. She must do so. Otherwise how could things ever be better? How could they ever end happily, or ever end at all? Her eyes wandered about seeking something fervently; there was a terrified expression in them. But there was no other way out. Kate Schlieben prepared herself for the confession with a resoluteness that she would not have been capable of a year ago. For one moment the wish came to her to call Paul to help her. But she rejected the thought quickly--had he ever loved Wolfgang as she had done? Perhaps it would be a matter of no moment to him--no, perhaps it would be a triumph to him, he had always been of a different opinion to her. And then another thing. He might perhaps forestall her, tell Wolfgang himself, and he must not do that. She, she alone must do that, with all the love of which she was still capable, so that it might be told him in a forbearing, merciful and tender manner.