She let her hands fall from her face. Every drop of blood receded from her cheeks and brow. Then, as she raised both arms as if shielding herself from him, she cried, in a voice from which all the pent-up torment of a thousand sleepless nights seemed to break forth-- "Leo, she was your mistress!" Now he needed his utmost strength to parry the attack. "I don't understand you, my dear," he said, shrugging his shoulders with affected coolness. "Are you going to deny it, Leo?" she asked. He looked hard at her, full of suspicion. Yet, after all, what could she know? A rumour from the gossip round neighbouring coffee-tables may have reached her ears, which had become a fixed idea in her pondering brain, and now seemed to her an actual fact. That must be it. It couldn't be otherwise. Yet he resolved, at all events, to sound her cautiously. "Look here, my dear child," he said, "nothing is further from my thoughts than to pose to you as a saint. I am, and have been all my life, a full-blooded piece of goods.... But, I assure you ... I haven't the slightest notion to which of my foolish affairs--all are over now--you are referring." "I am not speaking of 'foolish affairs,' but of adultery," she answered. "Indeed! Is it possible?" he inquired, still schooling himself to scorn. "That is almost worthy of the holy mouth of our old pastor Brenckenberg. And that leads me to a conclusion at which I have slowly arrived, that you have had a hand in the lamentations he poured out over me to-day." "You have only just arrived at that conclusion?" she exclaimed. "You know I am a little dense," he replied, with a laugh. But a cold sweat had broken out on his forehead. She gazed at him, seeking to find a passport into his soul. "You want to spare her," she said, with a weary smile of contempt. "It is hardly necessary now. I let myself be deceived by her long enough. She knew well how to play, the innocent with those eyes. Through her consummate acting she ruined you all ... the perfidious woman." She had clasped the arm of the chair with her thin hands, and sat erect as if preparing for a spring. Leo hung greedily on her lips. "She understands the art of hating," he thought, and his heart beat loud. And then, without further inquiry on his part, she told him how she had discovered the secret. It was about two years ago, when Felicitas was already engaged, that she had found her one day in his study rummaging in his writing-table, the key of which was generally in Ulrich's keeping, and, when she saw that she was caught, she went down on her knees and had besought Johanna not to betray her; it was because she could no longer endure the thought of her fiancé sitting at the same writing-table which contained her letters that she had searched for them. Her letters, and to whom? So it had come to light. "The fool!" Leo burst forth. "She might have known that her letters were burnt long ago."