“As for me,” said Reitzei, eagerly and nervously, “I tell you this, I should like to have something exciting now—­I do not care what.  I am tired of this work in London; it is slow, regular, like the ticking of a clock.  I am for something to stir the blood a little.  I say that I am ready for anything.”

“As for me,” said Beratinsky, curtly, “no one has ever yet called me a coward.”

Brand said nothing; but he perceived that this was something unusually serious, and almost unconsciously he closed his right hand that he might feel the clasp of Natalie’s ring.  There was no need to appeal to his oaths of allegiance.

Lind proceeded, in a graver fashion,

“Yes, I confess that personally I am for avoiding violence, for proceeding according to law.  But then the Council would say, perhaps, ’Are there not injuries for which the law gives no redress?  Are there not those who are beyond the power of the law?  And we, who have given our lives to the redressing of wrongs, to the protection of the poor, to the establishment of the right, are we to stand by and see the moral sense of the community outraged by those in high places, and say no word, and lift no hand?’”

He took up a book that was lying on the table, and opened it at a marked page.

“Yes,” he said, “there are occasions on which a man may justly take the law into his own hands; may break the law, and go beyond it, and punish those whom the law has failed to punish; and the moral sense of the world will say, ‘Well done!’ Did you ever happen to read, Mr. Brand, the letter written by Madame von Maderspach?”

Brand started at the mention of the name:  it recalled the first evening on which he had seen Natalie.  What strange things had happened since then!  He answered that he did not know of Madame von Maderspach’s letter.

“By chance I came across it to-day,” said Lind, looking at the book.  “Listen:  ’I was torn from the arms of my husband, from the circle of my children, from the hallowed sanctuary of my home, charged with no offence, allowed no hearing, arraigned before no judge.  I, a woman, wife, and mother, was in my own native town, before the people accustomed to treat me with respect, dragged into a square of soldiers, and there scourged with rods.  Look, I can write this without dropping dead!  But my husband killed himself.  Robbed of all other weapons, he shot himself with a pocket-pistol.  The people rose, and would have killed those who instigated these horrors, but their lives were saved by the interference of the military.’  Very well.  Von Maderspach took his own way; he shot himself.  But if, instead of doing that, he had taken the law into his own hands, and killed the author of such an outrage, do you think there is a human being in the world who would have blamed him?”

He appealed directly to Brand.  Brand answered calmly, but with his face grown rather white, “I think if such a thing were done to—­to my wife, I would have a shot at somebody.”