With this statement Rosalie stopped and looked around her, frightened by her own frankness, which she now recognized as unwise and fatal to the last degree.

The unlooked-for and dignified reserve of her injured husband, together with his ghastly paleness disturbed her, and her inquietude grew to painful anxiety as he maintained silence.  At length he said “I have learned to love you truly and passionately, my wife, and now you show me how you have returned the affection which my heart bestowed upon you.  You are right when you accuse me of having laid too much stress upon vain trifles.  For that very fault I have been most severely punished, for had I wooed you in woollen, instead of in velvet, I should never have had the misfortune to be bound to a woman like you.  Nor was it love that led me to you, but the miserable ambition to bring a nobleman’s daughter into my burgher home.  So we both deceived each other, and now if you wish to return whence I took you—­you may leave my home unhindered.”

The young wife buried her face in her hands and answered:  “No, no, life is too miserable and poverty-stricken at home and I have suffered too much in the long struggle to keep up appearances.  And then what would people say?  No, no,—­I will do everything that I can to please you.”

“Very well, you may stay,” he replied gloomily.

Frau Schimmel, who had been in the room for some time, turned to the notary and said:  “The Court apothecary used to say that I was stupid, but thirty years ago I foretold what has happened here today.”

She then implored Zeno to throw the elixir into the Pleisse, but for the first time he exhibited a will of his own.  He put the phial and the document in his father’s writing into his breast pocket, and tucking the gray-haired notary under his arm, he left the room.

Frau Schimmel followed his example.  Having reached the ground-floor she stopped and, shaking her gray head, murmured:  “Doctor Melchior was such a wise man, I wonder he did not order that each of his successors should make the girl of his choice inhale the elixir before he proposed to her.  The life I led with Vorkel, and with my second husband Schimmel, who lies beside the first in the churchyard, was hardly perfect, but Zeno’s existence will be hell upon earth.”

But this time Frau Schimmel was a little wide of the mark in her prophesy.  The two young people, for a time, treated each other distantly and coldly, but Fran Rosalie learned to regard her husband with a timid respect that sat well upon her.  As for him he was transformed into a stern man since he had inhaled the elixir, and his severe dress seemed but an outward sign of his earnestness.  Before the year was out a boy was given to them, and when Rosalie saw him take the little one in his arms and kiss it, she called him to her bedside and whispered:  “Forgive me.”

He made a sign of pardon, and stooping, kissed her white face, that was still the dearest in the world to him.  Then he went to his own room and inhaled the elixir whose properties and effect he had long before learned from Frau Schimmel.  He called aloud, as if speaking to another person:  “If she be good to the child, I will no longer make her feel how she hurt me, though I can never forget it.”