"I would rather you did, dear. Ask anything. We are holding nothing from one another now."
"I just happened to think—I wanted to know—oh Karl, it wasn't in your eye on my birthday, was it? It hadn't happened—wasn't happening—when we sat there by the fire, happier than we had ever been before?"
His impulse was to hold that back. Why should he put that upon her, too, to hurt her as it had him, shake her faith as it had tried to shake his?
But his moment of silence could not be redeemed. "Karl,"—her voice was strangely quiet—"it wasn't, was it?"
He groaned, and she had her answer.
She sprang away from him, standing straight. "Then," she cried—he would never have dreamed Ernestine's voice could have sounded like that—"I hate the world! I despise it! I will not have anything to do with it! It fooled us—cheated us—made fun of us! I'll despise it—fight it"—the words became incoherent, the sobs grew very wild, she sank to the floor, crouching there, her hands clenched, sobbing: "I hate it! Oh how I want to pay it back!"
He was long in quieting her, but at last she would listen to him.
"Ernestine," he said, his voice almost stern, "if you start out like that you cannot help me. It is to you I look. If you love me, Ernestine, help me not to hate the world. If we hate the world, we have given up. Sweetheart,"—the voice changed on that word—"even yet—even yet in a different way, I want to win. I cannot do it alone. I cannot do it at all, if you hate the world. You are to be my eyes, Ernestine. You are to see the beautiful things for me. You are to make me love them more than I ever did before. You are to be the light—don't you see, sweetheart? And you cannot do it, don't you see you cannot, if your own heart is not right with the world?"
She did not answer, but she came back to his arms. Her quick breath told him how hard she was trying.
"See your statue up there, liebchen? Remember how you always liked it? What you said about it that night? Oh, Ernestine"—crushing her to him—"help me to grip tight to my broken sword!"