“And who wrote them?”

“Major von Crampas.”

“So, things that occurred when you were still in Kessin?”

Innstetten nodded.

“So, it was six years ago, or half a year longer?”

“Yes.”

Wuellersdorf kept silent.  After a while Innstetten said:  “It almost looks, Wuellersdorf, as though the six or seven years made an impression on you.  There is a theory of limitation, of course, but I don’t know whether we have here a case to which the theory can be applied.”

“I don’t know, either,” said Wuellersdorf.  “And I confess frankly, the whole case seems to turn upon that question.”

Innstetten looked at him amazed.  “You say that in all seriousness?”

“In all seriousness.  It is no time for trying one’s skill at pleasantry or dialectic hair-splitting.”

“I am curious to know what you mean.  Tell me frankly what you think about it.”

“Innstetten, your situation is awful and your happiness in life is destroyed.  But if you kill the lover your happiness in life is, so to speak, doubly destroyed, and to your sorrow over a wrong suffered will be added the sorrow over a wrong done.  Everything hinges on the question, do you feel absolutely compelled to do it?  Do you feel so injured, insulted, so indignant that one of you must go, either he or you?  Is that the way the matter stands?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know.”

Innstetten sprang up, walked to the window, and tapped on the panes, full of nervous excitement.  Then he turned quickly, stepped toward Wuellersdorf and said:  “No, that is not the way the matter stands.”

“How does it stand then?”

“It amounts to this—­that I am unspeakably unhappy.  I am mortified, infamously deceived, and yet I have no feeling of hatred or even of thirst for revenge.  If I ask myself ‘why not?’ on the spur of the moment, I am unable to assign any other reason than the intervening years.  People are always talking about inexpiable guilt.  That is undeniably wrong in the sight of God, but I say it is also in the sight of man.  I never should have believed that time, purely as time, could so affect one.  Then, in the second place, I love my wife, yes, strange to say, I love her still, and dreadful as I consider all that has happened, I am so completely under the spell of her loveliness, the bright charm peculiarly her own, that in spite of myself I feel in the innermost recesses of my heart inclined to forgive.”

Wuellersdorf nodded.  “I fully understand your attitude, Innstetten, I should probably feel the same way about it.  But if that is your feeling and you say to me:  ’I love this woman so much that I can forgive her everything,’ and if we consider, further, that it all happened so long, long ago that it seems like an event in some other world, why, if that is the situation, Innstetten, I feel like asking, wherefore all this fuss?”