Ulrich nodded gravely. "She wrote to me about--about the divorce, as you may suppose. And so I went to look her up. I did not like the idea of leaving the poor thing to her own devices in case she should go altogether to the bad."
Leo could not help feeling a jealous pang. Ulrich spoke of the woman so gently. Would he deal as tenderly with him?
"But when I found her looking fresh and gay, as if relieved of a burden----"
"You really found her like that?" Leo asked eagerly.
Ulrich bowed his head, and an ironical smile played about the corners of his mouth.
"Then I saw plainly how much I had been to blame. I ought never to have offered my hand to a healthy young creature, made in every fibre for love and pleasure; I, a fragile unsound subject, hardly capable of dragging through life alone. I hope that she will be happy now. I do not love her. I ceased to care for her the day I knew---- But we won't speak of the boy. Still, no one shall cast a stone at her."
Leo breathed more freely. Ulrich evidently did not regret her, and this shadow no longer lay between them.
"To pass on to ourselves," said Ulrich, leaning back in his chair with a gesture denoting mental fatigue. His features lost their expression of strained severity, and as his mouth opened two lines of pain shot up into his sunken cheeks.
"Another bad quarter of an hour," Leo thought, whose hopes of a happy issue were now high again, "and then we shall be on quite the old footing."
"Do you remember, my dear boy," Ulrich went on, with his eyes fixed distressfully on vacancy, "the day of your return, when we sat and drank together at the Prussian Crown? You said to me then that my marriage would cost us our friendship. I wouldn't believe you at the time, but now I see that you were a thousand times right."