"No, don't laugh; don't laugh! Forgive me! Don't let me be ruined. Be my refuge and rock of strength. I am devoured by a longing for absolution.... You are pure.... A saint. Will you show me the right way--guide and help me to repent? Pray for me, and teach me to pray. Let me come to you when my guilt is driving me to distraction and despair. Let me kneel and weep ... like this ... at your feet." She made an attempt to embrace Johanna's knees, but she who had been looking down on her with hard compressed lips, quickly drew herself away, and, picking up the train of her dress, stepped by her. "Listen to my answer," she said. "You have laid your scheme very skilfully, that must be admitted; but you are in error if you imagine I don't see through you. You and I understand each other, Felicitas; there can be no fencing between us. I take very little interest in you now. I say of you what the Apostle Paul said of the heathen--'What are they to me that I should judge them?' What are you to me that I should condemn or forgive you? You must make your own reckoning with what you call life. But if you think that I shall quietly stand by and look on while you draw my brother into your toils for a second time, and ruin him body and soul----" "Oh, Jesus!" cried Felicitas. However much she might have planned and rehearsed this interview, that bitter cry from the depths of her tormented soul had not been in the programme. Even Johanna seemed for a moment impressed by it; then she quickly took up again the thread she had dropped. "Naturally, you deny it. You are an adept at playing the innocent. To be quite open with you, I myself have been instrumental in my brother's approaching you, as a means of putting an end to your insane conduct; for your husband's house must be cleansed at any price. But it was not your place to make the first advance. For you to do it was shameless, if not something worse. The foundation of your soul is overgrown by rubbish and weeds. But they shall be dug up." A gleam of secret terror flitted over the unhappy penitent's tear-stained countenance. She rose slowly and threw herself into the armchair. "This is the reward one gets for speaking the truth," she thought. "I might just as well have used the Ulrich pretext, and the rest would have been simple." Was she now to throw up the game as lost? No, not yet. She felt that the highest trump of all was up her sleeve. But she wasn't quite sure how to play it. So, like one who was at the last gasp and resigned, she said-- "Very well, send for him. I am ready." Johanna fixed her eyes on her piercingly, as if she expected a new trick. Then she caught hold of the bell-rope, but let it fall again. "You still think that I am in joke?" she asked; while Felicitas, apparently calm, followed every movement of her hands with a pained smile. "I think that you are bent on ruining me," she replied; "and that is enough." "Why should I wish to do that?" "Because you hate me, Johanna."