having planted these
barbed arrows in the breasts of his daughter, his sister, and his
friend, sought the retirement of his own upper room. As he left them,
Minna buried her face in Aunt Hedwig's capacious bosom and cried
bitterly, and Aunt Hedwig also cried; and Herr Sohnstein, laying aside
for the moment his pipe, put his arms protectingly around them both.
They all were very miserable.

In the upper room, where the air seemed so stifling that he had to open
the window wide in order to breathe, Gottlieb was very miserable too.
He was fleeing into Tarshish, this temporarily wicked baker; and just as
fell out in the case of that other one who fled to Tarshish, his flight
was a failure: for this little world of ours is far too small to give
any one a chance to run away from committed sin.

Gottlieb tried to divert his thoughts from his crime, and at the same
time tried to reap its reward by studying the stolen recipe; but his
attempt was not successful. The cramped letters, brown with age, on the
brown parchment, danced before his eyes; and the quaint, intricate High
German phraseology became more and more involved. He could make nothing
of it at all. And the thought occurred to him that perhaps he never
would be able to make anything of it--that, without losing any part
of the penalty justly attendant upon his crime, the crime itself
might prove to be, so far as the practical benefit that he sought was
concerned, absolutely futile. As this dreadful possibility arose before
his mind a faintness and giddiness came over him. The room seemed to be
whirling around him; life seemed to be slipping away from him; there
was a strange, horrible ringing in his ears. He leaned forward over the
table at which he was sitting and buried his face in his hands.

Then, possibly, Gottlieb fell asleep, though of this he never felt
really sure. What is quite certain is that he saw, as clearly as he
ever saw her in life, his dear dead Minna; but with a face so sad, so
reproachful, so full of piteous entreaty, that his blood seemed to stand
still, while a consuming coldness settled upon his heart. He struggled
to speak with her, to assure her that he would repair the evil that he
had done, to plead for forgiveness; but, for all his striving, no other
words would come to his lips save those which a little while before
he had spoken so roughly to poor Aunt Hedwig: "The only people who see
ghosts are women and fools!"

And then, of a sudden,