“Very well,” returned the rabbi, seeing that this was the very way to get the young woman to talk—­“very well, I say, you are not imagining anything.  I believe that you have greatly sinned.  Have you come here then to confess this sin?  Do your parents or your husband know anything about it?”

“Who is my husband?” she interrupted him, impetuously.

Thoughts welled up in the rabbi’s heart like a tumultuous sea in which opposing conjectures cross and recross each other’s course.  Should he speak with her as with an ordinary sinner?

“Were you, perhaps, forced to be married?” he inquired, as quietly as possible, after a pause.

A suppressed sob, a strong inward struggle, manifesting itself in the whole trembling body, was the only answer to this question.

“Tell me, my child,” said the rabbi, encouragingly.

In such tones as the rabbi had never before heard, so strange, so surpassing any human sounds, the young woman began: 

“Yes, rabbi, I will speak, even though I know that I shall never go from this place alive, which would be the very best thing for me!  No, rabbi, I was not forced to be married.  My parents have never once said to me ‘you must,’ but my own will, my own desire, rather, has always been supreme.  My husband is the son of a rich man in the community.  To enter his family was to be made the first lady in the gasse, to sit buried in gold and silver.  And that very thing, nothing else, was what infatuated me with him.  It was for that that I forced myself, my heart and will, to be married to him, hard as it was for me.  But in my innermost heart I detested him.  The more he loved me, the more I hated him.  But the gold and silver had an influence over me.  More and more they cried to me, ‘You will be the first lady in the gasse!’”

“Continue,” said the rabbi, when she ceased, almost exhausted by these words.

“What more shall I tell you, rabbi?” she began again.  “I was never a liar, when a child, or older, and yet during my whole engagement it has seemed to me as if a big, gigantic lie had followed me step by step.  I have seen it on every side of me.  But to-day, when I stood under the chuppe, rabbi, and he took the ring from his finger and put it on mine, and when I had to dance at my own wedding with him, whom I now recognized, now for the first time, as the lie, and—­when they led me away——­”

This sincere confession escaping from the lips of the young woman, she sobbed aloud and bowed her head still deeper over her breast.  The rabbi gazed upon her in silence.  No insane woman ever spoke like that!  Only a soul conscious of its own sin, but captivated by a mysterious power, could suffer like this!

It was not sympathy which he felt with her; it was much more a living over the sufferings of the woman.  In spite of the confused story, it was all clear to the rabbi.  The cause of the flight from the father’s house at this hour also required no explanation.  “I know what you mean,” he longed to say, but he could only find words to say:  “Speak further, Veile!”