We felt a great joy and pride in what we had done for Fischer, and were expecting Satan to sympathize with this feeling; but he showed no sign and this made us uneasy.  We waited for him to speak, but he didn’t; so, to assuage our solicitude we had to ask him if there was any defect in Fischer’s good luck.  Satan considered the question a moment, then said, with some hesitation: 

“Well, the fact is, it is a delicate point.  Under his several former possible life-careers he was going to heaven.”

We were aghast.  “Oh, Satan! and under this one—­”

“There, don’t be so distressed.  You were sincerely trying to do him a kindness; let that comfort you.”

“Oh, dear, dear, that cannot comfort us.  You ought to have told us what we were doing, then we wouldn’t have acted so.”

But it made no impression on him.  He had never felt a pain or a sorrow, and did not know what they were, in any really informing way.  He had no knowledge of them except theoretically—­that is to say, intellectually.  And of course that is no good.  One can never get any but a loose and ignorant notion of such things except by experience.  We tried our best to make him comprehend the awful thing that had been done and how we were compromised by it, but he couldn’t seem to get hold of it.  He said he did not think it important where Fischer went to; in heaven he would not be missed, there were “plenty there.”  We tried to make him see that he was missing the point entirely; that Fischer, and not other people, was the proper one to decide about the importance of it; but it all went for nothing; he said he did not care for Fischer—­there were plenty more Fischers.

The next minute Fischer went by on the other side of the way, and it made us sick and faint to see him, remembering the doom that was upon him, and we the cause of it.  And how unconscious he was that anything had happened to him!  You could see by his elastic step and his alert manner that he was well satisfied with himself for doing that hard turn for poor Frau Brandt.  He kept glancing back over his shoulder expectantly.  And, sure enough, pretty soon Frau Brandt followed after, in charge of the officers and wearing jingling chains.  A mob was in her wake, jeering and shouting, “Blasphemer and heretic!” and some among them were neighbors and friends of her happier days.  Some were trying to strike her, and the officers were not taking as much trouble as they might to keep them from it.

“Oh, stop them, Satan!” It was out before we remembered that he could not interrupt them for a moment without changing their whole after-lives.  He puffed a little puff toward them with his lips and they began to reel and stagger and grab at the empty air; then they broke apart and fled in every direction, shrieking, as if in intolerable pain.  He had crushed a rib of each of them with that little puff.  We could not help asking if their life-chart was changed.