"Poor Leo!" she said, and there was a note of compassion in her tired voice.
"Yes, indeed poor Leo, poor Leo!" he exclaimed, planting himself before her in his consternation. "You can pity me, but you won't hesitate, nevertheless, to ruin me."
"You are ruined already," she muttered.
"And if I am, whose fault is it but yours and that cur of a priest? I'll be even with him too. You want to speak now, when neither God nor devil can do anything. But why did you not speak out at the time that Ulrich was going to take the insane step of marrying? You were the only person in the world who might have prevented the blunder. Why did you keep your mouth shut then, eh?"
She glanced at him from under her lids in furtive distress. Then a shudder swept the angular shoulders, on which her dress hung in ill-cut folds.
"I have repented. Oh! how I have repented everything--everything!" she murmured.
"Repented or no, that is not the question. When I asked you in the summer, it was the same. You answered by evasion. I say that if you have a clear conscience, you would have answered me then, and would answer me now."
"Oh, don't torment me!" she implored, in growing anxiety, and leant far back in the corner of the sofa. And on Leo repeating his demand even more emphatically, she burst into hysterical weeping. Motionless she sat there, with the tears streaming in rivulets over her hollow cheeks.
He had never seen her look so yielding and so defenceless, and in the midst of his wrath and misery a gleam of chivalrous pity stirred within him, and he began involuntarily to speak to her in gentler tones.
"Listen, Johanna. I came here hating you very sorely, God knows. A little more, and I might have---- But you are not what you were, for all your threats. You and I are both poor bruised and broken creatures, so we may as well be frank with each other. Come, tell me what I wish to know, before it is too late."