“Yes, and he was sorely tempted. But do you think that it is—natural? That an educated man should commit such a crime——”
“Education!” he said, slowly; and in the aftertime which cast such an awful shadow over her life, she recalled his words: “Has that anything to do with it? Education teaches us to conceal our passions; it does not, cannot destroy them! No, under the thin veneer which civilization plasters over us, lie the old savage instincts, and if you scratch your man of refinement deep enough, you will find the passions of the barbarian still existing. Given a temptation fiery enough, and your man of rank, position, education will fall.”
“That is terrible,” she breathed; “and you think that any one—any one—could be tempted to commit—murder?”
His dark eyes rested on her.
“It depends on the temptation,” he said, as if rather communing with himself than answering her. “Some men could not be induced to commit even an indiscretion for the sake of all the mines in Peru, but for another motive—the one motive—lust of power, ambition, revenge, love——” he paused, and the word rang in her brain—“he would descend to any crime—aye, even murder.”
The faint shudder ran through her again, and he seemed to know it, for he said, in a lighter tone:
“But this kind of morbid talk is shamed by such a night. What a lovely moon! It reminds me of those lines of Heine:
“‘Goddess of our sleeping hours
When silver tints the drooping flowers.’”
and he repeated in a low, musical voice, that seemed to sing the words, the whole of the short poem; surely one of the sweetest in the German tongue.