“I love you well enough to tremble for your future fate,” said she gloomily.  “Judas hanged himself—­the ungrateful always come to a bad end!  You are deserting me, and you will never again do any good work.  Consider whether, without being married—­for I know I am an old maid, and I do not want to smother the blossom of your youth, your poetry, as you call it, in my arms, that are like vine-stocks—­but whether, without being married, we could not get on together?  Listen; I have the commercial spirit; I could save you a fortune in the course of ten years’ work, for Economy is my name!—­while, with a young wife, who would be sheer Expenditure, you would squander everything; you would work only to indulge her.  But happiness creates nothing but memories.  Even I, when I am thinking of you, sit for hours with my hands in my lap——­

“Come, Wenceslas, stay with me.—­Look here, I understand all about it; you shall have your mistresses; pretty ones too, like that little Marneffe woman who wants to see you, and who will give you happiness you could never find with me.  Then, when I have saved you thirty thousand francs a year in the funds——­”

“Mademoiselle, you are an angel, and I shall never forget this hour,” said Wenceslas, wiping away his tears.

“That is how I like to see you, my child,” said she, gazing at him with rapture.

Vanity is so strong a power in us all that Lisbeth believed in her triumph.  She had conceded so much when offering him Madame Marneffe.  It was the crowning emotion of her life; for the first time she felt the full tide of joy rising in her heart.  To go through such an experience again she would have sold her soul to the Devil.

“I am engaged to be married,” Steinbock replied, “and I love a woman with whom no other can compete or compare.—­But you are, and always will be, to me the mother I have lost.”

The words fell like an avalanche of snow on a burning crater.  Lisbeth sat down.  She gazed with despondent eyes on the youth before her, on his aristocratic beauty—­the artist’s brow, the splendid hair, everything that appealed to her suppressed feminine instincts, and tiny tears moistened her eyes for an instant and immediately dried up.  She looked like one of those meagre statues which the sculptors of the Middle Ages carved on monuments.

“I cannot curse you,” said she, suddenly rising.  “You—­you are but a boy.  God preserve you!”

She went downstairs and shut herself into her own room.

“She is in love with me, poor creature!” said Wenceslas to himself.  “And how fervently eloquent!  She is crazy.”

This last effort on the part of an arid and narrow nature to keep hold on an embodiment of beauty and poetry was, in truth, so violent that it can only be compared to the frenzied vehemence of a shipwrecked creature making the last struggle to reach shore.

On the next day but one, at half-past four in the morning, when Count Steinbock was sunk in the deepest sleep, he heard a knock at the door of his attic; he rose to open it, and saw two men in shabby clothing, and a third, whose dress proclaimed him a bailiff down on his luck.