Then slowly, as one recalls a wild dream, he went over again the events of the past night. Why had she not turned him back at the garden gate, when she knew Ulrich was in the house? For a moment he entertained the mad suspicion that she had laid a trap for him, but the next, he rejected it as unlikely.
He had not quite regained clear consciousness. His forehead ached, his eyes burned. A confused medley of thoughts and images passed through his brain; and then there leapt up within him an illuminating flame of certainty--
"Now he knows!"
Now he knows--he knows. It was all over with hypocrisy, lying, and evasion, nervous anxiety, and enervating desire. The long corrupting process to which his inner man had been subjected had reached its finality. Once more he might draw a deep free breath from his sorely weighted lungs.
He thrust open the window, and breathed in long draughts of the snow-laden air, which braced and refreshed him. His mood was now so clear and calm, that he felt as if body and soul had been purified and hallowed in that white mantle of snow.
The flakes descended in whirling columns. They seemed to push and struggle with each other as to which should first reach the earth.
They hid the yard in impenetrable clouds. Only here and there a gable or a stable window peeped out on the battle-field of snowflakes.
He had taken farewell already of his belongings; had consigned to ruin with rage and scorn the heritage that had come down to him from his forefathers.
But to-day it was with calm resignation that he relinquished everything that his heart had so long held dear. A supreme indifference to all that had happened, and was yet to happen, overcame him. Even the wrong that he had done Ulrich no longer deeply affected him.
He would let him shoot him dead, and then basta! But suppose he should miss! What if his hand trembled. It could not, it must not. To outlive this day was unthinkable. He would receive the sanctifying bullet in silence, in grateful silence that he had been allowed to die an honourable death.