your hand? And yet I was master of my fate, and knew what I did.
No, let there be day before us and behind us night, that none may look
upon us! Only promise me that in the _future_ all your thoughts shall
belong to me alone.'

"She sobbed violently in my arms, and made me the fairest promises. I
almost believe that at that moment she did indeed mean what she said,
for there was a sound spot in her that had not yet been touched by the
worm--a longing for what was pure and good. If this had not been the
case, how would it have been possible for me to have continued in my
blindness longer than the few weeks of the honey-moon? But she herself
seemed so happy in those first months, though we lived quite by
ourselves--for I had broken with my old cronies, and had no particular
desire to form new acquaintances, whom I could only have found among
the Philistine class that I so heartily despised. Then, too, she grew
more charming with each day. Once in a while, however, I caught her
poring over her prompt-books; and then I told her bluntly, for I could
see that her eyes were red with weeping, that she longed to be back
behind the foot-lights again, that she missed the applause and grieved
because she could not any longer turn the heads of the whole parquet.
'What can you be thinking of!' she laughed. 'In my condition! Why, I
should feel like sinking through the deepest trap-door, I should be so
ashamed!' In this way she would drive away my suspicions; and when at
length her child was born, I really thought she was so taken up with
household joys and cares that she cared for nothing else.

"It is true she was not such a foolish mother as to think her child an
angel of beauty. It was a rather plain, unattractive-looking little
thing--'the father over again,' remarked the women, very justly. But
she played the _role_ of mother with considerable talent; and not until
a long time later, when she was sent to the sea-shore to recuperate,
did it occur to me that she parted without any particular grief from
the laughing and cooing little creature that clung so tightly to her. I
staid at home and let her go over to Heligoland by herself, in the
charge of an elderly friend of hers--an actress, but a woman bearing an
irreproachable name. I happened to have a few orders that it was
necessary to execute just as soon as possible--among others two busts
of a rich wharfinger and his wife--and as our household, small as it
was, made pretty hea