‘You love—’ he began, and stopped abruptly; then, with a short, miserable laugh, said: ‘After that I will go, certainly. And for the future I beg you will spare me your pity. I do not need it. Good-night.’ He turned on his heel and left the room. He did not know how he groped his way to the door and opened it, for he could see nothing. At last he found himself in the dank, soft, misty outside air again, just entering the market-square of Lahnburg, repeating her last words to himself over and over again, blankly, vacantly, and mechanically: ‘Because he is my husband, and I love him.’ [Illustration] CHAPTER IX. A MYSTERY. ‘Oh snows so pure, oh peaks so high! I shall not reach you till I die!’ _Songs of Two Worlds._ Wellfield found his way somehow to the station, and waited for the train to Frankfort, pacing about the little asphalted platform with feelings of the most horrible shame and humiliation–a longing to quit the place, to lose the recollection of it–a sensation that he belonged to a different world, a lower order of creature than she did, and that to approach her was folly, and must necessarily result in disaster, in singed feathers and maimed pinions. Blended with this was a sudden yearning, stronger than he had ever felt before, to see once more the gentle eyes of the wife who, he knew, would never love any other than him, let his shortcomings or the nobility of the other be never so strongly contrasted. Truly, could his moral stature, his innermost _ich_, have been disrobed then and placed naked before the eyes of men, it must have presented but a sorry, grovelling kind of figure. The slow, jog-trot train came rumbling in, and bore him in leisurely fashion past all the little stations, till at last, long after half-past eight, they arrived at Frankfort. He trailed his steps slowly up the street to the hotel. What he had just gone through mentally–the moral scourging he had just sustained, had exhausted him more than the hardest day of physical exertion could have done. He felt used up–_todtmüde_, as he dragged himself up the steps into the dazzling light of the hall, filled with piles of luggage and groups of visitors–men smoking, girls flirting with them, parties of people taking their coffee, an incessant passing to and fro, and cheerful bustle. It seemed that there was to be no pause, no reprieve in the sequence of his calamities just then. A waiter came up to him, and asked if he were the person to whom ‘_dieses telegram_’ was addressed. Mechanically he took it; his apprehension dulled with the moral castigation from which he was freshly come, and opened it, dully wondering from whom it came, and what in the world it was about. ‘_John Leyburn_, _Wellfield._ _To Jerome Wellfield, Esq._, _–Hotel, Frankfort-am-Main._ ‘Your wife has a son. She is very ill. Return at once, or you may be too late.’