Lower and lower she bent her head. "Kill me," she said, "for I deserve it. What he writes is true. I do love him."
Nathan started convulsively. His usually placid features were strangely agitated. "The truth!" he hissed; "and you remain in my house, you false wife?"
She looked him in the face with flashing eyes.
"Nathan!" she cried, "I swear by my dead mother that he touched my hand to-day for the first time."
"What if I believe you?" he said. "Shall we divide you between us? Shall I possess you, and he have your love? Are you not mine, body and soul? and if you could not be altogether mine, why did you become my wife?"
She stepped close up to him, and said, with a despairing gesture, and a sharp ring in her voice: "Do not be so hard, Nathan. I have been a true wife to you; but when you ask why I married you, I reply, that my wishes were never consulted."
Her words seemed to strike him, for he could not answer, and there was a long silence.
She buried her face in the sofa-cushions.
At last he said, "Go--we will talk of this to-morrow."
He bolted the door and resumed his restless pacing up and down. The old servant knocked at the door--she had brought the supper-tray, but he dismissed her at once. She went away grumbling, and he heard her afterward saying to the cook: "God knows what is the matter! The master has locked himself into the parlor, and the mistress is in her bedroom. Neither of them will have any supper."
A hot flush of shame mounted quickly to Nathan's face.
"The servants suspect something already," he thought, "and soon all the world will wonder what has happened. Old Jutta is right; God alone knows what misery has fallen on my house, and God alone can help, for I know not what to do."
He threw himself down on the sofa, and thought it all over again, but he could not keep still, and soon started up and began to walk up and down the room again.
"How foolish it was of me to say that God alone could help!" he thought. "God can not be expected to work miracles for our individual needs. What can God do but let him die, or me?--that would solve the difficulty."
He pressed his burning brow on the window-pane, and stared out into the darkness. "I possessed a treasure, and I did not know its value until another, who was wiser than I, came and took it from me. Perhaps--perhaps I deserve it....