mumbling in a delirium, evidently very
ill. Peter Schmidt picked up the cablegram lying on the floor. He and
Miss Burns felt that in the circumstances they were justified in learning
its contents. What they read was:

Dear Frederick, news from Jena. In spite of the greatest care Angele
passed away yesterday afternoon. Take the inevitable with composure.
Keep yourself well for your loving old parents.

For a week Frederick hovered between life and death. The powers of
darkness, perhaps, had never grappled for him so greedily. For a week his
whole body was like something about which tongues of fire lick and roar,
ready to consume it and send it up into the air, like a puff of smoke.

Peter Schmidt, of course, brought all his medical skill to his friend's
service. Mrs. Schmidt, too, did whatever she could for him. Miss Burns
felt it was predestination, not chance, that had brought her to his side
at so critical a moment, and instantly decided not to leave until he was
entirely out of danger. She engaged a woman attendant and a man to go on
errands by day and night.

The terrible frenzy in which Frederick had been the night before was
apparent from the way in which things had been thrown about. The glass of
his seaman's clock on the wall was broken, and dishes were shivered to
bits. Peter Schmidt's diagnosis was typhoid fever. The first two days and
nights he did not leave Frederick's side, except when his wife took his
place. The paroxysms repeated themselves. Memories of the shipwreck still
tormented him, and at certain hours he would tell his attendants, whom he
did not recognise, to look in a corner of the room, where, he said, a
black spider, the size of a bowling ball, was lying in wait for him.
Peter and his wife with extreme caution applied all the means at a
physician's disposal to reduce his temperature; but the third day passed,
and still it did not fall below 105.8 deg.. Peter grew graver and graver.
Finally, however, the fever curve showed declinations, and by the end of
a week its downward course remained pretty constant.

Frederick looked like a pale, empty, incombustible husk, inside of which
a great auto-da-fe had taken place. What a wild orgy salamander-like
creatures must have been holding behind his sweaty forehead. Countless
times, by the most different methods, Angele murdered Ingigerd and
Ingigerd Angele. His father, the general, fought a pistol duel with Mr.
Garry, Captain von Kessel acting