room where Wilhelm and Wahlenfer were sleeping. There, he told me, he
stood still for a moment. The throbbing of his heart was so strong, so
deep, so sonorous, that he was terrified; he feared he could not act
with coolness; his hands trembled; the soles of his feet seem planted
on red-hot coal; but the execution of his plan was accompanied by such
apparent good luck that he fancied he saw a species of predestination in
this favor bestowed upon him by fate. He opened the window, returned
to the bedroom, took his case of instruments, and selected the one most
suitable to accomplish the crime.

"When I stood by the bed," he said to me, "I commended myself
mechanically to God."

At the moment when he raised his arm collecting all his strength, he
heard a voice as it were within him; he thought he saw a light. He flung
the instrument on his own bed and fled into the next room, and stood
before the window. There, he conceived the utmost horror of himself.
Feeling his virtue weak, fearing still to succumb to the spell that was
upon him he sprang out upon the road and walked along the bank of the
Rhine, pacing up and down like a sentinel before the inn. Sometimes he
went as far as Andernach in his hurried tramp; often his feet led him up
the slope he had descended on his way to the inn; and sometimes he lost
sight of the inn and the window he had left open behind him. His object,
he said, was to weary himself and so find sleep.

But, as he walked beneath the cloudless skies, beholding the stars,
affected perhaps by the purer air of night and the melancholy lapping of
the water, he fell into a reverie which brought him back by degrees to
sane moral thoughts. Reason at last dispersed completely his momentary
frenzy. The teachings of his education, its religious precepts, but
above all, so he told me, the remembrance of his simple life beneath the
parental roof drove out his wicked thoughts. When he returned to the inn
after a long meditation to which he abandoned himself on the bank of the
Rhine, resting his elbow on a rock, he could, he said to me, not have
slept, but have watched untempted beside millions of gold. At the moment
when his virtue rose proudly and vigorously from the struggle, he knelt
down, with a feeling of ecstasy and happiness, and thanked God. He felt
happy, light-hearted, content, as on the day of his first communion,
when he thought himself worthy of the angels because he had passed one
day without sinn