Sendlingen groaned and buried his face in his hands.
"Her fate moves you?" asked Berger. "It is certainly piteous enough! The men brought her to the village and informed the police at Golotz. The preliminary examination took place the next day. It could only establish that the child had been strangled; it was impossible to take the depositions of the murderess: she was in the wildest delirium, and the prison-doctor expected her to die. But Fate," Berger rose and his voice trembled--"Fate was not so merciful. She recovered, and was sent first to Golotz and then brought here. She admitted that in the solitude of that dreadful night, overcome by her pains, forsaken of God and man, she formed the resolve to kill herself and the child--when and how she did the deed she could not say. I am persuaded that this is no lie, and I believe her affirmation that it was only unconsciousness that prevented her suicide. Doesn't that appear probable to you too?"
Sendlingen did not answer. "Probable," he at length muttered, "highly probable!"
Berger nodded. "Thus much," he continued, "is recorded in the judicial documents, and as all this is certainly enough to arouse sympathy, I went to see her as soon as the defence was allotted to me. Since that I have learnt more. I have learnt that a true and noble nature has been wrecked by the baseness of man. She must have been not only fascinatingly beautiful, but a character of unusual depth and purity. One can still see it, just as fragments of china enable us to guess the former beauty of a work of art. For this vessel is broken in pieces, and her one prayer to me was: not to hinder the sentence of death!... But I cannot grant this prayer," he concluded. "She must not die, were it only for Justice's sake! And a load is taken off my heart to think that a human being is to preside at the trial to-morrow, and not a rhetoric machine!"
He had spoken with increasing warmth, and with a conviction of spirit which this quiet, and indeed temperate man, seldom evinced.
His own emotion prevented him from noticing how peculiar was his friend's demeanour. Sendlingen sat there for a while motionless, his face still covered with his hands, and when he at length let them fall, he bowed his head so low that his forehead rested on the edge of the writing-table. In this position he at last blurted forth: