"Leo, I am desperate without you," she complained, in a subdued tone. "Why have you forsaken me?" "How can you talk of forsaking?" he muttered. "While Ulrich is away, I can't come. That is all." "Why not?" "How can you ask?" "But I do ask. We have repented and confessed. We have expiated our sin before God and man. We know that we are on the right footing now." "Indeed! That is how you feel about it?" "Yes; and don't you feel the same?" she asked, looking up at him innocently. His answer stuck in his throat. Was it he alone, then, who was damned? Had God accepted her oblation and rejected his? "We went to the Sacrament together," she continued, "and thereby gained our souls' salvation. We ought now to be quite sure of ourselves." "We ought to be; certainly we ought to be," he sneered. "Leo, please don't be so mistrustful. How can any evil befall us if we are sincere in following the path of penitence. We must hold together. If you leave me to fight alone, I am powerless. Day after day I have been expecting and waiting for you. Every morning I have got up with the question on my lips, 'Will he come?' And then I have hoped for the morrow, and again for the morrow, and so I have gone on. Oh, how long the time has seemed! My life has been sad and monotonous, and finally I was driven to despair and said to myself, 'If he gives you up you must give yourself up.' And so I began the old nonsense again with those boys. I have turned their heads and let them pay me attentions. And to-day a devil possessed me, and I thought, 'I'll just show him that I can do without him.' But all the time my heart was heavy, and I was crying out to you in my soul. But you were so hard and cruel, that I was forced to go on playing my part." A strange sensation of content suffused his limbs. He felt as if a dead weight had fallen from them. He felt wholesomely tired, and could have stretched himself out on the spot and fallen asleep. "And now you'll send those youths to the right about?" he asked. "Leo!" "Yes or no?" "With the greatest pleasure in the world if you will come and see me again." "But if I don't come?" She hung her head in utter discouragement. "Then I can't say what I shall do," she stammered. "When do you expect Ulrich home?" he asked, to divert her. "Ah, Ulrich!" she exclaimed quickly. "In every one of his letters he has inquired after you and sent messages. Some he has addressed to us both. But I haven't dared write to him, because I haven't seen you. And what would he think if he knew you hadn't been once?" "That's true enough," he said, and thought to himself that even the most trustful person would be struck by such extraordinary conduct. Then he repeated his question as to when Ulrich was coming back.