only an
explanation from you could give me back my faith in my own heart. I
have never lost that faith. I believe to-day, as yesterday, that my
heart knew perfectly well what it was about when it surrendered itself
to you."

"You are an angel from heaven!" he cried, his grief breaking forth;
"you seek to defend me even from myself. Yet for me with my hopeless
lot to have forced myself into your quiet life, will never cease to be
a crime. That is what I said to myself yesterday the moment I left your
door. This letter attempted to say the same thing, and informed you
also of my firm resolve never to show myself in your sight again. But
the strange hand that tugs at the chords of my ruined life, and seeks
to tear them asunder, has shattered this resolve. Now I owe you a
longer confession than could be written in a letter. For not until you
know all about me will you be able to understand that, though it was a
sin, it was still a human one, that caused me so to forget myself; and
that you need not withdraw your respect from me--though you do your
heart--and your hand."

He was silent again for a moment; she, too, said nothing. She trembled,
but she strove hard to appear calm, so that he would go on. How
willingly she would have heard her fate in two words--her "to be or not
to be!" What did she care for all the rest? But she felt that he had
more to tell her, and she would not interrupt him.

"I hardly know," he continued, "how much our friend Angelica has told
you about me. I am a peasant's son, and had to struggle through a hard
childhood; and it was a long time before I could bend my stiff
peasant's neck so that it fitted without chafing in the yoke of city
etiquette. Few men have ever gone such strange ways as I have, always
wavering between defiance and humility, audacity and shrinking, as
well in my dealings with my fellow-men as in my art. I had a mother of
the true old yeoman nobility--which is synonymous with true human
nobility--at least in our part of the country. She finally succeeded in
making a strong, silent man of my father, who had a streak of the
tyrant in him. If she had lived longer, who knows whether I should ever
have left her? But soon after her death I prevailed upon my father to
let me go to the art-school at Kiel. I did little good there. There was
a wild element among the scholars, and I was not the tamest. I always
had a great contempt--perhaps because I was ashamed of my peasant's
manners-