your old
mother. But believe me, we are nothing without God's help and mercy. Pray
sometimes. It won't do any harm. I know how you reproach yourself on
Angele's account. Binswanger says you may have a perfectly easy
conscience. And if you pray, believe me, God will remove every thought of
guilt from your harassed soul. You are only thirty. I am seventy. From
the experience of the forty years more that I have, I tell you, your life
can still turn out so that some day you will scarcely have a recollection
of all you are now suffering. You will remember the facts; but you will
try in vain to recall the feelings of anguish with which they are now
connected in your mind. I am a woman. I was fond of Angele. And yet I
could observe you two together perfectly objectively. Believe me, there
were times when she would have driven any man desperate.

* * * * *

The end of the letter was all motherly tenderness. Frederick saw himself
at his mother's sewing-table by the window, and in his thoughts kissed
her hair, her forehead, her hands.

When he looked up, he heard the steward remonstrating with the American
and heard the American say in good German:

"The captain's a donkey."

The word had the effect of an electric shock. The next instant another
pile of matches sent up a wavering flare in the gloomy, terrifying
twilight.

Frederick mentally cut out the young man's cerebrum and cerebellum for an
anatomical examination, proceeding strictly according to the rules of
dissection, as he had so frequently done in actuality. He hunted for the
centre of stupidity, which undoubtedly composed the American's whole
soul, though his impudence, which he possessed in a rare degree, may also
have had its seat in the brain. Frederick had to laugh. In his amusement
he realised that little Ingigerd Hahlstroem no longer had any power over
him, less, perhaps than, for example, the dark Jewess from Odessa, whom
he had seen for the first time only a quarter of an hour before.

Captain von Kessel entered. He greeted Frederick with a slight nod of
his head and seated himself at a table beside a lady, with whom he was
acquainted, apparently. The American coxcomb and the pretty Canadian
exchanged glances. She was languishing in her easy-chair, pale but
coquettish. Frederick set her down as a woman of unusual southern
beauty--straight nose, quivering nostrils, heavy, nobly arched eyebrows,
black as her hair and the sha