“Very well; but if you go I shall go with you.”

“What! you would leave your home, your friends, your beloved Paris—­ give up all you have been accustomed to, and follow me to Germany?”

“To Germany—­to the Inferno—­wherever you like.”

“You do not mean it seriously.”

“I do mean it, very seriously.  I cannot live without you.”

“But you have duties, you have your children—­”

“I have no children, I have only you.  And if my children were a barrier between you and me, I would strangle them with my own hands.”

She spoke with such savage determination that he shuddered.  But the battle must be fought out.  He must not yield now.

“There is nothing for it,” he said after a pause, during which he stood with downcast eyes, fumbling nervously with the buttons of his morning coat.  “Our position would be equally wretched wherever we were.  Fate is stronger than we are.  I do not see how we are to escape it.  Wherever we went, we should have to hide the truth, and surround ourselves with a tissue of lies, and that I cannot stand.  I would rather die.”

“Die?” she exclaimed, and her eyes flamed up wierdly—­“I am quite ready.  That is a way out of the difficulty.  Die—­whenever you like; but live without you?  No, I will cling to you; no power on earth shall tear me from you.  If you want to shake me off, you will have to kill me first.”  “And yet you said you would not try to hold me back if I wished to leave you.”

“And you remembered those foolish words!  While my heart was overflowing, you listened coolly and took note of everything, so that you might use it against me afterward.  I really did not think you were so noble, so generous minded, as that.”

“You see that you were mistaken in me.  I am narrow-minded, mean-spirited, a thorough Philistine; you have said so repeatedly.  What do you see in me to care for?  Let me go.”

“Oh, how you fix on every word and then turn it against me!  I am not equal to you; you are stronger than I, because you do not love me and I love you.  What do I care if you are narrow-minded—­a Philistine?  If you were a highway robber I would not let you go.”

She stretched out her arms to him and drew him to her, and pressed him so tightly to her bosom that he could hardly breathe.  Then she burst into tears, and wept so bitterly, so inconsolably, from the bottom of her heart, like a child who has been very deeply hurt.  In order to value woman’s tears aright, one must have often seen them flow.  Wilhelm was a novice in this respect.  He imagined that Pilar’s tears were the outcome of the same amount of pain as he must have felt to weep like that, and every drop fell like molten lead upon his heart.  His resolutions melted like ice before the fire; he had not the courage to wound this clinging, loving, sobbing creature.  He rocked her gently in his arms till, exhausted by her frightful excitement, she fell asleep.