"And if I do so, what have I to expect? I will tell you, Fräulein Schommer; it is right that you should know the full extent of the request you have made of me. After I have made a public retractation all my comrades who have hitherto been my friends will fall away from me and despise me. 'He is a coward,' they will say; 'afraid evidently of Heydeck's well-known unerring aim.' My honour is lost, and with it my future career. I must leave the army, my comrades disdaining to serve with me! I am poor, Fräulein Schommer. You, rolling in luxury, have no conception of what it means to be poor. Having left the service, I must accept any, even the meanest, position that can insure me sufficient income to maintain a wretched existence, if indeed I do not have recourse to a bullet through my brains to end a life that has been such a wretched failure. This is my future if I fulfil your request. To-day the world stands open to me. The highest honours that crown a military career may be mine. In a few years I shall be captain and in a condition to offer my hand, without exposing myself to the charge of mercenary motives, to the lovely girl to whom I long since gave my whole heart. These hopes you ask me to destroy with my own hand; for how could I, a beggar, degraded in my own eyes and those of the world, ever venture to aspire to one heaped with all that can make life desirable? I should, and justly, be repulsed with scorn. Have you a right to require this sacrifice of me? I have given you my promise, and if you require it I will keep it, for there is nothing that you can ask which I will not perform, but before I do so, before you ask the sacrifice of my entire future, you must know what are the delicious hopes which you thus annihilate. It is you, Eva Schommer, whom I have loved passionately from the first moment when my eyes were gladdened by the sight of you. I have religiously concealed this love, for what right had a poor dragoon to reveal it? The thought that you might suppose I wooed you for your wealth, and not for your sweet self alone, would have driven me frantic. Therefore I was silent; therefore I curbed the wild desires of my heart. I resolved to wait until with, increase of rank I could offer you a position not unworthy of you. Yes, Eva, I love you with an intensity of which you cannot dream, and hence my right to step forth as the champion of your honour; hence the wound I felt when you so harshly rebuked my presumption. It is but just that I should tell you all this. Now decide my fate; it is in your hands. Ask of me my life, or, what is infinitely more dear to me, my honour, I will sacrifice everything to you."