Then he said, "The old proverb about the good intentions with which the path to Hell is paved, may hold good here too; but it only touches the surface of the matter. This resolve was a last abortive attempt to unite sisterly love with her longing for you, to make a pact between her powerful, burning desire for happiness and the impulse to keep faith towards her sister. It was the most unnatural thing she could hit upon, for silent resignation was not in her line. It was a particularly cruel fate which doomed her, with her noble disposition and powerful will, to be forced into a sin which is the most common and most cowardly on earth, a sin which I have found lurking on countless faces, when I stood at the bedside of people seriously ill. This, my boy, is one of the darkest spots in human nature, a remnant of bestiality which has managed to find its way into our tamed world; even such sensitive natures as Olga may fall a prey to it, though of course they perish through it, while coarser souls simply conceal and suppress what is struggling to appear from the darkest depths of their beings. Wait, I will speak more plainly. I once came to the bedside of a rich old man, a landowner, whose last breath was not far off. At the head of his bed stood his eldest son, a man of about forty, who for long years had held the post of inspector on strange estates, and whose intended bride was beginning to grow old and faded with waiting. The son was a good, honest fellow who would not have hurt a fly, who loved his father with all his heart, and would certainly have been ashamed to wish his deadliest enemy any ill; but in the stealthy, terrified glance with which he watched me, while I bent down my ear towards the old man's breast, I distinctly read the wish! 'Oh, that he might die!' Another time I was called in to a woman who was very happy in second marriage. Only one cloud troubled her new happiness. Her husband could not befriend himself with the child of her first marriage. He knitted his brows at the mere mention of the little creature, and as she loved him passionately, she feared he might come to hate her on the child's account, and hid it away from him as much as ever she could. The child got scarlet fever. I found the mother kneeling at its bedside and weeping bitterly. She trembled in fear for the feeble little life. Had she not herself brought it forth! Then her husband entered the room--she started--and in the restless, wavering glance which she cast towards the cradle, there stood clearly and legibly written: 'It would be for my happiness, if you died.' I could give you innumerable examples where jealousy, covetousness, desire for independence, restlessness, impulse for liberty, amorous longing, have matured this terrible, criminal wish, which suddenly rises up dark and gigantic within the human breast, in which hitherto only love and light have found a place. Happily nowadays it does not do much harm. In olden,