Gotthold stood helpless before a barrier that towered before him in impassable height, and which neither his anger nor his despair could remove. Of what crime could she be charged, except that young, generous, and confiding, she had allowed herself to be deceived by a villain, and then after long years of terrible, silent agony, had once more breathed freely at the sight of the friend of her youth, and fled to his arms for deliverance? And now she was the guilty one, and this scoundrel, asserting his rights, could mock, torture, kill her unpunished. Thus anger and love drove him restlessly around in the terrible circle, from which no escape seemed possible unless some means could be found to fasten the crime, before the eyes of all the world, upon the person who was really guilty. But how could such crimes be proved? Gotthold started in horror when, while racking his brains over the possibility, he surprised himself in the act of producing this proof. Should he sully his own and Cecilia's honor by revealing the dark secrets, which, under cover of the night, extended from the master's room at Dollan to the little attic chamber of the maid-servant? Never! And that the spendthrift and gambler would ever venture out of the dark mole-tracks of vice to the comparatively open road of crime was a thought that had also occurred to him; but there were too many probabilities against it. He did not give the scoundrel credit for the courage that always belongs to crime; besides, in that case, Wollnow would probably have expressed some suspicion; Wollnow, who, apparently out of sympathy for the Assessor, and perhaps also from the impulse of his own nature, which every dark problem irritated, had entered into the affair so eagerly, followed with so much care even the smallest clew that might lead to the discovery of the lost or stolen money. And, after all, was it not a psychological impossibility, that even a Brandow--if he had been directly or indirectly concerned in the robbery--could quietly clasp the hand of the man he had wronged, as he had done just now, when Gotthold met him engaged in a most animated conversation with the convalescent and his wife. True, the matter had been settled by the trustees of the convent of St. Juergen, in a manner particularly favorable to Sellien. Under the direction of Alma's father, who presided at the meeting, they decided that the Assessor was not in the least to blame, since, as the agent of the convent, he was authorized, nay obliged, to receive the money, and certainly could not be held responsible for what happened to him on Dollan moor, during and after the fall. So the convent merely set down the ten thousand thalers as lost, "and," Sellien's father-in-law said, "if we were requested to withdraw the warrant for the apprehension of Hinrich Scheel, I, for one, should make no objection. The fellow has escaped long ago, and it is neither for our interest, gentlemen, nor that of my son-in-law, to