It was a pitiless remark of mine, I knew. Lorand commenced to shiver, I felt it. He stood up before me and became so pale.
I wished I had addressed him more gently.
"My dear brother Lorand, could you bear to become responsible for a mother, who left her child, and for another who died for her child?"
Lorand clasped his hands and bowed his head.
"If you only knew what you are saying to me now?" he said with such bitter reproach that I can never forget it.
"But I have not yet told you all I know."
"What do you know? As yet you are happy—your life mere play—passion does not yet trouble you. But I am already lost, through what, you have no idea, and may you never have!"
How he must love that woman!
It would have cost me few words to make him hate and despise her, but I did not wish to break his heart. I had other means with which to steel his heart, that he might wake up, as from a delirious dream, to another life.
I too had had visions about my piano-playing beauty: but I had forgotten that ideal for ever and ever, for being able to play, after she knew her mother had run away.—But that was mere childish love, a child's thought—-there is something, however, in the heart which is awakened earlier, and dies later than passion, that is a feeling of honor, and I had as much of that as Lorand: let us see whose was the stronger.