In her bedroom hung a portrait of Christian painted in his twentieth year. It had been done three years before by a Swedish painter. It was very like him, and she adored it. One night she took it from the wall and placed it on a table and lifted the shade from a lamp nearby. She crouched in a chair, rested her head upon her hands, and gazed at the picture steadily and with a questioning passion. She asked the picture, but it gave no answer. She thrilled with a desire to take that head into her hands. But the face on the canvas smiled its equivocal and remote smile. If only she could have wept! But tears were denied her: too hard and unmoved had she passed through life. When morning came her maid found her still sitting before Christian’s picture. The painted face beside the burning lamp still smiled its alien smile. VI Johanna Schöntag wrote to Christian: “It is two months now since I parted from you. In those two months misfortune has been very busy with me and mine. My father committed suicide; that was why I was summoned home so suddenly. Rash speculations complicated his affairs beyond his power; he saw no way to prevent his being reduced to beggary, and determined to leave the scene of his failure thus abruptly. All obligations have been decently satisfied, and his good name has been saved. We are also told, as if it were a consolation, that he lost his head too soon, that things might have turned out better than he feared. But we are in an unenviable situation, and life is not showing us an admirable aspect. Such sudden transformations should be confined to melodrama. I am still badly confused; I hardly know what is happening to me. I envy those who have an aim of some kind and also the vitality to pursue it. I wonder whether you will write to me. Or have you already forgotten me? Have I even the right to ask that?” She sent this letter to Crammon with the request to forward it. Crammon replied: “My dear Rumpelstilzkin:--I hope that your voice will not die in the desert. Unhappy things have taken place. The man to whom you are writing has denied himself and his own past and all who love him. The Lord has darkened his soul; we are striving for his salvation. May your assistance bear rich fruit.” The words frightened her, and she did not know how to interpret them. She had time to reflect, for weeks passed before she received an answer to her letter; and this answer was worse than none at all. It came not from Christian himself but from Amadeus Voss, and was as follows: