honor to the cleverest Marinelli. When the knight was once lured far enough to make the return impossible, when he had been turned round and round till he knew no longer where his head was, then the moment had come when he might go up to him and say: Honored knight, what will you give your Pylades if he enables you to possess all the glorious things which heretofore have been mere phantoms seen in voluptuous dreams, in tangible reality? Unfortunately Oswald spared him much of the trouble. He was at that time unhappier and less self-reliant than he had ever been before. Berger's doctrine of contempt was a bad seed, which had fallen upon soil only too fertile. And since Oswald thought he had been betrayed by Melitta, he had, in order to be able the more readily to betray her himself, irrevocably lost the better part of his self-respect. It did not avail him that he charged all the blame of the rupture with Melitta upon her, that he called her a heartless coquette, who had betrayed him disgracefully, and who now laughed at the poor victim (how many were there in all?) in the arms of her lover. There was a voice continually whispering to him, which he could not silence, and which repeated again and again: You lie, you lie; a woman with such deep, loving eyes is not heartless; a woman capable of such love is not a coquette; a woman with such noble thoughts and feelings does not betray the man whose happiness she knows is in herself alone. But even his love for Helen was but a faint reflex of that heavenly, pure flame which had lighted up his heart like the moon in a dark night during the time of his love for Melitta. There was in this love much of that weird, consuming fire of an eager devouring passion which knows no holy reverence for its idol.