Leo rose to take his leave. This man, so inoffensive that one couldn't help liking him, was not the priest that his soul needed. So he hurried away, as much without comfort as he had come. He felt as if he could have shaken the dust of that home of peace from his feet, only there was no dust there to shake. He drove through the rainy twilight towards Uhlenfelde. Night had fallen before he drew up at its closed gates. His horse splashed in a pool of water, and a shower-bath of raindrops trickled on him from the leafless branches which flanked the road. He would have got down to pull the bell, but a numbness which had overtaken him made him set still instead, and stare in front of him. The gate-posts stood there like a pair of black hounds on their hind legs, glowering at each other. To right and left a piece of the wall crept out into the night; the rest was hidden by the darkness. Only from the castle came one pale path of light. It was the lamp burning in the bay where Ulrich's writing-table stood. It shimmered towards him along the damp undergrowth of the park, which stood out of the darkness here and there in mirrorlike patches, as if it wished to guide him to the place which he hesitated to approach. But the further it penetrated the fainter became the light, till at last it was powerless to withstand the night-shadows which swallowed it. Leo felt an icy shiver pass through his drenched body. "There is the priest I want," he thought; "the only one on earth who can save me." But of what avail were these weak longings? He would only stand before him to-day, as always, biting his lips, his frightened glance wandering along the walls, a martyr to nervous fears and yearning, his ears strained to hear if a gliding step was coming along the corridor, the step of one who would sweeten his distress, and destroy his hope. What object would there be in coming here to-day, if he did not confess and repent? His whip cracked. The horse stamped as he turned round in the spluttering water, through which the wheels ploughed with a creaking sound. He gave a last look, full of impotent rage and dull, painful longing at the peaceable stream of light which, like everything else in the world, served only to reproach him, and then he drove furiously back by the way he had come, still faintly hoping for what now was hopeless. The next morning the rain had ceased. A pale sunlight, broken up by the drifting masses of cloud for several minutes, and then gliding down on to the yellow plain, illumined the larches, and threw a sort of lantern reflection on the variegated walls of the outlying forest.