She pressed her forehead against the bowed head of the kneeling man, sobbing bitterly, and clung to his shoulders. And so they cried together and would not be comforted. When at last they lifted their heads they looked into each other's eyes, astonished and questioning. Was he this man? Was she this woman? It seemed as if their common sorrow had made them new creatures, and linked them as one for all time in guilt and the wretched consequence of their sin. She smiled at him inconsolably, but at the same time she was almost happy. "Lizzie, we are lost," he murmured. "Yes, we are lost," she said, still smiling, and then he left her. XXXIV On the first Sunday of the New Year, Ulrich alighted at the station at Münsterberg, after seeing the grave close over his step-son. He had decided, after long consideration, to have the boy buried in the place where he died, and if his wife felt herself equal to the strain, to have the body removed later to be interred in the family vault of the Rhadens at Fichtkampen. Felicitas had not spared him any of the details of her despair, illness, and attempted suicide, and had painted all in the darkest colours. She had too much to conceal to be able to express her grief simply and sincerely. The task lay before her of excusing herself, as far as was possible, of any blame in her child's death, and of presenting the whole unhappy affair to Ulrich and the world and to herself, tricked out in the guise of romance. Above all, it had never occurred to her to spare her husband. The letters she had written him from her bed with a feverish hand were full of endless laments that they had ever sent the boy so far away to school, which strengthened the pangs of remorse that already tortured his sensitive soul. With the instinct of self-preservation, she had tried to shunt the responsibility for what had happened on Ulrich's shoulders, in the same way as she had blamed Leo as an accomplice, so that Ulrich's easily disturbed conscience began to accuse him of being the cause of all the misery. "She was only like an irresponsible child," he said to himself, "following the whim of the moment. I ought to have thought of that and have remained firm in opposing her, even when it was the fate of her own flesh and blood that she was deciding upon." And then, what was worst of all was, that she had done it for him and him alone. So that he might continue to enjoy the friendship of the man who bore on him the stain of having killed the child's father, that child had been sent into banishment to meet his death. A sacrifice so cruel and unnatural had, as it was bound to be, been avenged, and, as things had shaped themselves, it had all been of no avail. The object for which the stupendous sacrifice had been made was not attained.