Dear Dietrich, listen to your old mother and put your trust in our loving Father in heaven.  I think you are an atheist.  Just laugh at your old mother.  But believe me, we are nothing without God’s help and mercy.  Pray sometimes.  It won’t do any harm.  I know how you reproach yourself on Angele’s account.  Binswanger says you may have a perfectly easy conscience.  And if you pray, believe me, God will remove every thought of guilt from your harassed soul.  You are only thirty.  I am seventy.  From the experience of the forty years more that I have, I tell you, your life can still turn out so that some day you will scarcely have a recollection of all you are now suffering.  You will remember the facts; but you will try in vain to recall the feelings of anguish with which they are now connected in your mind.  I am a woman.  I was fond of Angele.  And yet I could observe you two together perfectly objectively.  Believe me, there were times when she would have driven any man desperate.

* * * * *

The end of the letter was all motherly tenderness.  Frederick saw himself at his mother’s sewing-table by the window, and in his thoughts kissed her hair, her forehead, her hands.

When he looked up, he heard the steward remonstrating with the American and heard the American say in good German: 

“The captain’s a donkey.”

The word had the effect of an electric shock.  The next instant another pile of matches sent up a wavering flare in the gloomy, terrifying twilight.

Frederick mentally cut out the young man’s cerebrum and cerebellum for an anatomical examination, proceeding strictly according to the rules of dissection, as he had so frequently done in actuality.  He hunted for the centre of stupidity, which undoubtedly composed the American’s whole soul, though his impudence, which he possessed in a rare degree, may also have had its seat in the brain.  Frederick had to laugh.  In his amusement he realised that little Ingigerd Hahlstroem no longer had any power over him, less, perhaps than, for example, the dark Jewess from Odessa, whom he had seen for the first time only a quarter of an hour before.

Captain von Kessel entered.  He greeted Frederick with a slight nod of his head and seated himself at a table beside a lady, with whom he was acquainted, apparently.  The American coxcomb and the pretty Canadian exchanged glances.  She was languishing in her easy-chair, pale but coquettish.  Frederick set her down as a woman of unusual southern beauty—­straight nose, quivering nostrils, heavy, nobly arched eyebrows, black as her hair and the shadowy down over her fine, expressive, twitching lips.  Her gestures had the weary grace of a Spaniard.  She was laughing, and her long, slim form stretched on the chair shook.  Her admirer, with a comic expression of seriousness, was again building a little pile of matches.  In her weak condition she was unable to resist the impulse to laugh, and every now and then hid her face behind a black lace shawl.