Leo met him in the hall, hurrying, after the manner of busy doctors, to his conveyance. "How is she, doctor?" he asked, detaining him. "As well as can be expected," was the curt reply. "What does that mean? That all danger is past?" "It means that the baroness is simply suffering from an attack of bile, which I don't envy her." "Hasn't she taken poison?" "Poison! Humph! My dear sir, it depends on what you call poison. The baroness may have had the intention of taking her life, I dare say. But she went the wrong way about it. She drank her toothache drops, Herr von Sellenthin, a mixture of ether, alcohol, and oil, not exactly unpleasant to the taste, but one that few would be of sufficiently tough constitution not to feel some disagreeable effects from imbibing. Now she seems to have slept herself out, but will probably suffer a day or two yet from a disordered stomach. Good day to you, Herr von Sellenthin." He got into the sleigh, bowed, and drove off. Leo felt disgusted, and half disappointed; the most sacred spot in his heart seemed to have been rudely tampered with. The tragedy had become something very like a farce. Still, the child, the dear child, was dead. There was no getting over that. The wrath which always flamed up within him against this woman, at moments when his will was weakest and most impotent to meet her, hardened into cold aversion. He could have strangled her on account of those toothache drops. Everything, even the desire to die, became in her hands a miserable petty fraud. But the child was dead, and could not be brought back to life. He asked a maid-servant, who was apparently affected by the general alarm in the household, whether her mistress was visible. She answered shyly that she would go and see, and ran upstairs. Meanwhile, old Minna, coughing and sobbing, came in at the front door, and asked, wringing her hands, if the gracious one was still alive. Leo turned his back on her without deigning to answer, and she hobbled on up the stairs as fast as she could. He was alone, and it seemed a long time before any one came. He paced up and down between the pillars, where he and Ulrich as boys had played hide-and-seek, and he thought, "What shame have she and I brought on your house!" It would have come almost as a consolation if some one had hounded him with a horse-whip out at the door, the threshold of which his feet had desecrated. Instead, old Minna returned with beaming eyes and champing jaws, and declared joyously that the gracious little mistress was better again, and the gracious little mistress wished to see him. He clenched his teeth and followed the old woman upstairs. What he wanted to say to her he did not know; he was only aware of a dull desire to lay his fingers about her throat and choke her. So bitterly, at that moment, did he hate her.