“Ma’am, I have brought you to a sorry pass.  I was old, and you were young.  I experienced, you ignorant.  I deliberate, you impulsive.  I a man, you a woman.  Instead of restraining you, guiding you, shielding you from yourself, I was most vile, and fired you with desires for freedom that under the peculiar circumstances were wicked, set a ball rolling that I might have foreseen could never afterwards be stopped, put thoughts into your head that never without me would have entered it, embarked you on an enterprise in which the happiness of your whole life was doomed to shipwreck.”

She stirred a little, and sighed a faint protest.

“This is very terrible to me—­of a crushing, killing weight.  Let it not also have to be said that I mangled your very soul, dimmed your reason, impaired the sweet sanity, the nice adjustment of what I know was once a fair and balanced mind.”

She raised her head slowly and looked at him.  “What?” she said.  “Do you think—­do you think I’m going mad?”

“I think it very likely, ma’am,” said Fritzing with conviction.

A startled expression crept into her eyes.

“So much morbid introspection,” he went on, “followed by hours of weeping and fasting, if indulged in long enough will certainly have that result.  A person who fasts a sufficient length of time invariably parts piecemeal with valuable portions of his wits.”

She stretched out her hand.

He mistook the action and bent down and kissed it.

“No,” said Priscilla, “I want the milk.”

He snatched it up and gave it to her, watching her drink with all the relief, the thankfulness of a mother whose child’s sickness takes a turn for the better.  When she had finished she gave him back the glass.  “Fritzi,” she said, looking at him with eyes wide open now and dark with anxious questioning, “we won’t reproach ourselves then if we can help it—­”

“Certainly not, ma’am—­a most futile thing to do.”

“I’ll try to believe what you say about me, if you promise to believe what I say about you.”

“Ma’am, I’ll believe anything if only you will be reasonable.”

“You’ve been everything to me—­that’s what I want to say.  Always, ever since I can remember.”

“And you, ma’am?  What have you not been to me?”

“And there’s nothing, nothing you can blame yourself for.”

“Ma’am—­”

“You’ve been too good, too unselfish, and I’ve dragged you down.”

“Ma’am—­”

“Well, we won’t begin again.  But tell me one thing—­and tell me the truth—­oh Fritzi tell me the truth as you value your soul—­do you anywhere see the least light on our future?  Do you anywhere see even a bit, a smallest bit of hope?”

He took her hand again and kissed it; then lifted his head and looked at her very solemnly.  “No, ma’am,” he said with the decision of an unshakable conviction, “upon my immortal soul I do not see a shred.”