The quiet weeping that grows loud and is controlled again as if a sleeper were near whom it will not wake, that breaks out again as if it could not wake the sleeper, and again grows soft as if it were frightened at itself for being so loud when every one is quiet:  who does not know such weeping?  Who does not guess what it means, even if he does not know it?

Fritz Nettenmair knew it, half asleep; there was a dead person in the next room.  They had brought him home.  “We must submit to what is unalterable.”

For the first time for many months he slept quietly again.

And why should he not?  The quiet weeping turned into a merry waltz.  “There he is!  Now the fun will begin”—­the words rang triumphantly from the “Red Eagle Tavern” in the distance, into his sleep.

But the quiet steps and the quiet voices were real, and they continued; and there was a dead body in the next room, the beautiful, dead body of a child.  The breach between the parents had made the child ill; pain at her father’s savage attack on her mother had broken her little heart.

When the new day sent its first glimmer of light through his window, Apollonius rose from the chair on which he had sat ever since his return to his room.  There was something solemn in the manner in which he stood upright.  He seemed to say to himself:  “If it is as I fear, I must act for us both; it is for that that I am a man.  I have sworn to uphold my father’s house and his honor, and I will do what I have sworn to do, in every sense.”

Fritz Nettenmair woke at last.  He knew nothing more of the dream-scenes of the night.  He only knew that his wife had magnified the “spy’s” desire to be coddled into an illness so that she might have an excuse for being together with “him.”  He began to think of how he should put an end to this coddling.  With this idea in his mind he stepped through the door and stood—­before a dead body.  A shudder ran over him.  The dead child lay there before him like a sign to warn him:  “You shall not go farther on the way that you have taken!” There the child lay, his child, and she was dead.  The child stood before him, an accuser and a witness.  She bore witness for her mother.  The mother had known that she was dying; and at the deathbed of her child not even the lowest creature would do what he had thought her capable of doing.  The child accused him.  He had struck a mother at the side of her child’s deathbed.  No man can do that, not even if the woman were guilty.  And she was not; the child testified to that.  Now he knew that the pale, dumb countenance of the mother had cried:  “You will kill the child; don’t strike!” And he had struck nevertheless.  He had killed the child.  That thought fell on him like a thunder-bolt, so that he collapsed before the child’s bed, across which he had struck her mother, before the bed in which his child had died because he struck her mother.