"Of course," she continued, "I relied much on you. But when I wanted you most, you did not come. You went away. Oh, Leo, how cruel you have been to me! No, no! I won't hurt you. You are good, good as an angel. You have even forgiven me for forcing my way into Halewitz a second time. It's true, isn't it, you have forgiven me? And I have dared, too, to beard Johanna, to ameliorate her hate for you and me. Why, then, do you shun me? Why may I not call on you when it is all darkness and night within me, and the ghost of the slain----" He trembled. The ghastly picture that the old pastor's drunken phantasy had invoked rose before his mental vision. "Does he haunt you too?" he murmured, between his clenched teeth. "Don't ask.... I must be silent.... It is better for you and for me not to speak of it.... Then how could you have borne to stay away from me, if you had known----" "Known what?" "Another time, I'll tell you," she said imploringly. "Another time, when I feel miserable, not now, when I'm happy and breathe freely, because I am so safe with you beside me. Let me enjoy this hour to the full. Look at the sun melting into those red clouds. Doesn't it look as if it were weeping over us tears of blood?" He grunted, for the simile seemed to him extravagantly poetic. "Oh, why did we ever meet?" she murmured, turning her face up to the setting sun, so that it became suffused with a rosy glow. She sighed, but the sigh lost itself in a smile. "As we are on the subject," he said, feeling that the conversation had taken a dangerous turn, but at a loss how to change it into another channel, "meeting had nothing to do with it. For a year or more we had associated without any harm coming of it, despite the old boy-and-girl flirtation behind us. We should have been more careful to keep our inclinations in hand, that's all. Rhaden left us too much alone. We had too many opportunities of strolling in the park after dark, and sitting in shady nooks. That's what did it ... that's what did it." Half lying on the cushions, she propped her chin in her hands. "I wonder how the idea first came into our heads?" she asked dreamily. He shrugged his shoulders. "Can one say afterwards how such things happen?" he said. "It's like fever; no one knows how he gets it." "I remember, though, how it began," she whispered, still gazing at the sun. "It was a July evening. Rhaden had something to do in the town.... We were in the arbour, under the cut cypresses. You have got one like it at Halewitz. Do you remember the arbour?" Why did she ask? Till their dying hour, they were both bound to remember the place that had been the temple of their happiness and the origin of their damnation.