"Don't cry so much." He wanted to console her, but the tears rolled down his lined face too. He had travelled there as quickly as he could, urged on by a sudden anxiety--he had had no letters from her--he had come full of joy to surprise them, and now he found things like this. He strove for composure. "If only I had left him there--oh, if only I had left him there!" The man entered into his wife's feelings of torture and self-reproach, but he pointed to the dead boy, whose face above the white shirt looked peculiarly refined, almost perfect, young and smooth and quite peaceful, and then drew her more closely towards him with the other hand. "Don't cry. You were the one to make a man of him--don't forget that." "Do you think so?--Oh Paul!"--she bowed the face that was covered with tears in deep pain--"I did not make him any happier by it." She had to weep, weep unceasingly in deep acknowledgment of worldly error. She grasped her husband's hands tremulously and drew him down with her at the side of the bed. The hands of husband and wife were clasped together over the son they had lost. They whispered, deeply repentant and as though it came from one mouth: "_Forgive us our trespasses._"