He confined himself, therefore, to taking hold of her by the arm, and teazing her by a hundred taunts and gibes. He felt a kind of malicious sympathy with her. Had she, after all, done anything very bad? He, who was on the high-road to ruin and fully conscious of what he was doing, could not be hard on this little fool for stumbling in the blindness of her youthful pursuit of enjoyment. So when he had tormented her sufficiently, he kissed her and let her go. This had happened shortly after the dinner-hour was over. A little later, Hertha, pale from suppressed excitement, came to him with a letter from Johanna. His eldest sister wrote that she had things of urgent importance to speak to him about, and prayed that on the receipt of her note he would come to her immediately. "She may congratulate herself that I can obey her summons," he thought. But in spite of his feigned scorn and indifference, he knew that he was afraid of Johanna, or, if not of her, of the discomfort with which she always threatened him. For a reminder from Johanna that she existed meant nothing pleasant. A sudden current of vigorous life shot through his limbs and told him how much he could still hate. He hated her, and Felicitas, and every one. But her most of all. He put on his fur coat and strode over the park. It was nearly four o'clock. The pale winter sun was sinking, and scarcely able to illumine the monotonous greyness of the snow-covered fields with its feeble parting rays, though here and there there trembled over the landscape a crystalline-blue reflection. The shrubberies seemed like black crouching figures on the ground, and between the highest straggling branches the light peeped like a thousand round eyes. The girls had made a slide on the snowy surface of the carp pond, and it spanned it like a narrow dark ribbon from bank to bank. Absently Leo slid along the slide, and considered himself lucky that he got to the other side without a fall. He recalled the sultry afternoon on which he had smoked his cigar here, stretched out on the seat, and had awaited with perfect calm the interview with his sister. The seat was now cushioned with snow, on which the footmarks of birds had made a star-like pattern. He felt inclined to throw himself down there again in spite of the snow, and try to recover the equable frame of mind that he had been in then. "Ah, but she won't get off so well this time," he thought, and he made his way along the overgrown path that led to the dower house.