“Not even to be near me again?” asked Schrotter.

“Ah, yes,” answered Wilhelm quickly, and looked him affectionately in the deep-set blue eyes.

“You see now.  This wandering life is no good for you.  You must see about getting back to Berlin.”

“Yes, but you know—­”

“Of course I know.  But something must be done.  You must apply to the authorities to withdraw your sentence of banishment.”

“And you advise me to do this?”

“Unwillingly, as you may well suppose.  But I see nothing else for you.”

“And how should I word such a petition?  I could neither acknowledge a transgression in the past, nor promise amendment in the future.”

“No, it would be of no use going into details.  It would have to be a bald petition for pardon.”  And seeing Wilhelm recoil involuntarily, he added:  “It does not do to be too proud in such a case.  In the preposterously unequal struggle between the individual and the organized power of the State, it is no disgrace to declare yourself beaten and ask for quarter.”

“A petition without any gush or protestations of loyalty, in which I would simply say:  ’Please allow me to come back to Berlin, because I prefer it to any other place of residence,’ would certainly be ineffectual, and I should only have humiliated myself for nothing.”

“We must get somebody to take up your cause.  I shall do all in my power to make the Oberburgermeister put in a good word for you.”

“Would you yourself do what you are advising me to do?”

Schrotter was silent for a moment.

“I am not in the same case.  If Berlin were as much a necessity to me as it is to you I would do it—­most certainly.”

Wilhelm looked as if he were swallowing a bitter draught.  But Schrotter’s strong hand lay tenderly on the dark head.

“Yes, friend Eynhardt,” he said; “you will send in the petition, and it will, I hope, have the desired result.  Do it for my sake.  Yes, look at me; I have need of you.  I miss you.  I am getting to be an old man.  At sixty years of age one does not make new friendships.  All the more carefully does one keep those one has.  Berlin has seemed to me a desert—­almost unbearable, without you.  You do not know how impossible things have become there.  They are misusing, without one pang of conscience, the most touching and lovable characteristic of our people—­its sense of gratitude, which it exaggerates to the point of weakness.  They are doing all they can to bind Germany hand and foot, to gag her and drag her back into absolutism before her sentimentality will allow her to put herself on the defensive.  They are pandering to the lowest instincts of the people, and enervating their manhood by every artifice in their power.  Thus they have successfully achieved the introduction into Germany of that most degraded form of self-worship—­Chauvinism.  They poison her morality by wisely organizing that every conscience,