"Poor woman!" he said, coming nearer to her--"poor woman!" and he laid his right hand gently on her puritanically smooth head. She looked up at him with the glance of a whipped hound, sighed deeply, and made an effort to lean her head against him. Seeing the movement, he sat down beside her and put his arm round her neck. They sat thus for a long time, clasping each other closely, their eyes fixed on the floor. Now, when he realised how much the woman in his arms was his deadly enemy, every vestige of his hatred for her ebbed from his heart. Was she not made of the same clay as himself? She half a lunatic, he half a criminal, and both the victims of a tragic fate? The Sellenthin blood which had boiled so hotly in their veins had driven them along different paths to the same end. He took Johanna's head caressingly between his hands, and they gazed at one another as if they could never look away. Brother and sister had found each other again in this encounter of savage fury, and in the depths of profoundest misery. At last he kissed her on the forehead, and rose to go. "And you still feel that you must tell him?" he asked. "It is your firm resolve?" Her features became strained, and her eyes again started and burned feverishly. "Don't ask me," she said, in a tone of tearful obstinacy. "It is God's decree; God Himself has demanded it of me. Can I disobey God? And it must be soon, or my statement may not be credited as rational." "Well, then, God's will be done," he said, taking up his cap. "Good-bye, Hannah." "Good-bye, Leo." Outside, he began to whistle his favourite "Paloma" air. He felt that he had received his death-sentence. XXXVI "Die, old boy; die--die!" a voice seemed to call to him as he walked along, and his spectral giant with the hatchet nodded assent as much as to say, "So far, so good." There was only one alternative, and that was flight. In four-and-twenty hours he might be at Hamburg, thence take ship over the ocean, never to return. There was a sum of three thousand marks to draw upon, the rest he must trust the Lord to provide; or, more strictly speaking, Ulrich. Who would come and go through the accounts, appease the creditors, call in interest, and work heaven and earth to save the reputation of the disgraced fugitive? Ulrich, again; Ulrich, and no one else. The reflection was so intolerable that it robbed him of the power of making any decision. A written confession was out of the question, for what would become of Felicitas, exposed and betrayed, left behind in Ulrich's house? How could he leave her in the lurch--she who clung to him with the deadly terror of a guilty woman? Besides, he was full of longing for her. There was not a fibre of his being that did not crave to possess her. He was incapable of picturing an existence without this horrible, agonising desire, which must remain for all eternity unfulfilled.