"That is the reason? Oh! my friend, as if I needed such an assurance--as if your hasty departure yesterday had not told me that you did not trust yourself to stay because you--because you had only said what you did in a moment of self-forgetfulness--and yet, believe me, that was a thoughtless word that slipped from my pen, that 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--for what we were pleased to call the Philistinism of the worthy citizens. That I, as an artist, was permitted all sorts of liberties that were denied to officials, scholars, and tradespeople, pleased me greatly; and I abused my freedom without stint. But as I moved in a very narrow circle, and seldom came in contact with any high type of humanity, I had no great field in which to display the profligacy of my thoughts and habits. A few wretched _liaisons_, and a number of silly and by no means edifying scrapes, were all that came of it.