It was bad enough, for the girl loved him and was sensitive.

But it would be worse--how much worse, she dared not think--to see him go mad before her very eyes, to see him taken away at last from the midst of them all to the huge brick house in the outskirts of the city beyond the Isar.
One more hypothesis remained.

This time the story might turn out true.

She believed in his birth and in his misfortunes, and in the existence of his father and his brother.

They might indeed be dead, as he had told her, and he would then, perhaps, be sole master in their stead--she did not know how that would be, in Russia.