Disquieted, like a tortured spirit, now wringing his hands, now clenching his fists, Fritz Nettenmair wandered from the shed to the house and from the house again to the shed.  With each round he made, his soul rose up in the wildest defiance and sank again into despairing helplessness.  His heart cried out for a word of love.  His arms stretched out convulsively to press something to his heart which was his, that he might know he was not lost.  For nobody is lost who has somebody in the world to love.  Endowed of a sudden with renewed strength, he hastened through the house door into the room where his children lay.  A night-light protected by a shade shone brightly enough for the father to see his children.  He sank on his knees before the nearest little bed.  A long forgotten sound rose to his lips and he whispered it, yearningly as never before.  “Fritz!” He only wanted to clasp his children to his heart once, to see their love and then to go; to go and become another man, a better one, a happier one.  The little fellow awakened:  he thought his mother had called.  Smilingly he opened his eyes and—­shivered with fright.  He feared the man standing at his bedside; one he knew so well, and yet more strange than a stranger to him.  It was the man who had given him such angry glances, the man from whom his mother had locked him in his room that he might not see what the man did to her.  But he had got up trembling and listened at the door; and clenched his little fists in powerless rage.

“Fritz,” said the father anxiously, “I am going away and I shall not come back.  But I will send you beautiful apples and picture-books, and think of you a thousand times a minute.”

“I don’t want them,” replied the boy, frightened but defiant.  “Uncle ’Lonius gives me apples.  I don’t want yours.”

“Don’t you love me either?” asked the father in a breaking voice at the second little bed.  George took flight into his brother’s bed.  There the children clung to each other in fright.  Scorn and repugnance were reflected in George’s face.  “I love mother and I love Uncle ’Lonius, but I don’t like you.  Let me alone; I’ll tell Uncle ’Lonius.”

Fritz Nettenmair laughed in wild mockery, and at the same time sobbed in impotent pain.  The children were no longer his.  He was no longer their father.  Yet they were his children!  And he had to go away and leave them; and those whom he hated, who had ruined everything for him, would be happy through his going.  He became even more miserable than he had already been.  He saw his wife lying before him in her beauty, and the desire entered his mind to destroy this beauty.  But his recollection of the moment when he lay stretched before his father, prepared for death, was mightier than the desire and banished it.  The picture of that moment lived strong within him, only there was an exchange of persons.  He painted it with more and more vivid colors.  And now it was a fierce joy that drove him again from the house to the shed and from the shed to the house.  His arms moved in violent gesticulation.  The moon rose.  The house with the green shutters lay there so peaceful in its shimmer.  No passer-by would have divined the unrest concealed behind its walls; none would have suspected the thought that hell was brewing there in a ruined vessel.