'Give me a word of answer, Edmund. You rushed away like a madman yesterday. There was no holding you back. I trust that you have grown calmer by now, and that you can at least listen to what I have to say. I have just come from your mother----'
The mention of this name seemed at length to produce some effect. Edmund shivered slightly, and sat up.
At sight of his countenance the Baron started back, scared and shocked.
'For God's sake, what ails you? How can you allow yourself to be so utterly overcome?'
The young man's features were indeed so changed as to be hardly recognisable. The misfortune which had befallen him seemed at one dire stroke to have taken from him all strength and courage. The dimmed look of his eyes and the complete prostration evident in voice and bearing told this plainly, as he replied:
'You know no details. Have you really no questions to put to me?'
Heideck glanced uneasily at his nephew. A passionate outburst of feeling would have pleased him better than this numb listlessness. He sat down by Edmund and took his hand.
The young man offered no resistance; he seemed hardly to know what was going on about him.
'Yesterday I did all in my power to conceal the truth from you,' pursued the Baron; 'for I myself am perhaps not blameless in this unhappy business. I interfered in a somewhat arbitrary manner with the lives of two human beings, and the fault, if fault it were, has been cruelly avenged. My intentions were indeed of the best. I knew that the young officer to whom my sister was attached, and even secretly engaged, was as poor as herself. He had no fortune to offer her, he could not have married for years, and I had too sincere an affection for Constance to allow her to lose the bloom of her youth, to pine away in anxiety and sadness. When I separated her from her first love, and persuaded her to accept the hand of Count Ettersberg, I did so in the firm persuasion that her attachment had been a mere transient romance, a passing fancy, which marriage would cure at once and effectually. Could I have guessed what deep root the feeling had taken, I would not have interfered. It was only about a year later, when I heard that the regiment had been moved and quartered in the garrison-town nearest to Ettersberg, that I began to divine a danger, and my next visit here transformed the suspicion into a certainty. When the two met, their old love sprang up with fresh intensity, and developed into a passion which bore down all barriers before it. When I discovered this, when I stepped between them and forcibly recalled them to a sense of their duty, it ... it was, I grieve to say, too late!'