With a drooping head Katharina withdrew to her room and there stood looking out into the garden.  It all was hers now; she was mistress of it all and of much besides, as free and unfettered to command as hitherto she had been over the birds, her little dog, or the jewels that lay on her toilet-table.  She could make hundreds happy with a word, a wave of the hand—­but not herself.  She had never felt so grown-up, independent, womanly, nay powerful, and at the same time so unutterably wretched and helpless as she felt in this hour.

What did she care for all these vanities?  They could not suffice to check one sigh of disappointed yearning.

She had parted from her mother with a promise; the fervent longing that filled her soul was never still; and now the patriarch’s letter had given her a hint as to how she might fulfil the one and silence the other.  She hastily took the document up again, and read it through once more.

Its instructions were precise to stop the proceedings of the misguided Memphites with stern promptitude.  It explained that the death of the Christ Jesus, who shed His blood to redeem the world, had satisfied the need for a human victim.  Throughout the wide realms which the Cross overshadowed with blessing human sacrifice must therefore be accounted a useless and accursed abomination.  It went on to point out how the heathen had devised their gods in the image of weak, sinful, earthly beings, and chosen victims in accordance with this idea.  “But our God,” it said, “is as high above men as the Spirit is above the flesh, and the sacrifice He demands is not of the flesh, but of the spirit.  Will He not turn away in wrath and sorrow from the blinded Christians of Memphis who, in their straits, feel and are about to act like the cruel and foolish heathen?  They take for their victim a heretic and a stranger, deeming that that will diminish the abomination in the eyes of the Lord; but it moves Him to loathing all the same, for no human blood may stain the pure and sacred altars of our mild faith, which gives life and not death.

“Ask your blind and misguided flock, my brother:  Can the Father of Love feel joy at the sight of one of His children, even an erring one, suffocated in the waters to the honor of the Most High, while struggling, and cursing her executioners?

“If, indeed, there were a pure maiden, possessed with the blessed intoxication of the love of God, who was ready to follow the example of Him who redeemed man by His death, to fling herself into the waters while she cried to Heaven with her dying breath:  ’Take me and my innocence as an offering, O Lord!  Release my people from their extremity!’—­that would be a victim indeed; and perchance, the Lord might say:  ’I will accept it; but the will alone is enough.  No child of mine may cast away the life that I have lent her as the most sacred and precious of gifts.’”

The letter ended with pious exhortations to the community.