"Then you know that already?" cried the young man, passionately. "You seem to be so perfectly informed, that it only remains for me to confirm the news others have been so kind as to tell you. It is certainly my intention to continue my studies in Italy, and if I should meet Signora Biancona there--if her vicinity give me fresh inspiration to compose--her hand open me the door to the world of art, I shall not be fool enough to reject all this, just because it is my fate to possess a--wife!"
Ella shuddered at the unsparing hardness of the last words.
"Are you so ashamed of your wife?" she asked, softly.
"Ella, I beg you--"
"Are you so ashamed of me?" repeated the poor wife, apparently calmly; but there was a strange, nervous, trembling inflection in her voice. Reinhold turned away.
"Do not be childish, Ella," he replied, impatiently. "Do you think it is good or elevating for a man, when he returns home after his first success, there to find complaints, reproaches, in short, all the wretched prose of domestic life? So far you have spared me it, and should do the same in future. Otherwise you might discover that I am not the patient sort of husband who would allow such scenes to take place without resistance."
Only a single glance at the young wife was required to recognise the boundless injustice of this reproach. She stood there, not like the accuser, but like the condemned; indeed she felt that in this hour the verdict was spoken upon her marriage and her life.
"I know well that I have never been anything to you," said she, with trembling voice, "never could be anything to you, and if I only were concerned, I would let you go without a word, without a petition. But the child is still between us, and therefore"--she stopped a moment, and breathed heavily----"therefore you can comprehend that the mother should pray once more for you to remain with us."
The petition came out shyly, hesitatingly; in it could be heard the effort it cost her to make it to the husband, in whose heart no chord throbbed for her, and yet in the last words there rang such a touching, frightened entreaty, that his ear could not remain quite deaf. He turned to her again.
"I cannot stay, Ella," he replied, more mildly than before, but still with cool decision. "My future depends on it. You cannot conceive what lies in that word for me. You cannot accompany me with the child. Besides this being quite impossible in a tour undertaken for study, you would soon be very miserable in a foreign country whose language you do not understand, in circumstances and surroundings for which you are quite unsuited. You must, indeed, now accustom yourself to measure me and my life with another measure than that of narrow-minded prejudice and middle-class contracted ideas. You can stay here with the little one, under your parents' protection; at latest I shall return in a year. You must resign yourself to this separation."