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“Yes, I have been with him,” Magda may perhaps have answered, defiant and erect even in her chalk-pale terror.

What happened then? No one really knows, but probably there was a desperate pursuit round the courtyard. At the foot of the old linden the girl tripped and fell. She dared not call for help, for fear the invalid might hear; and besides, who would have helped her? Her mother was away at work. The infuriated woman was above her—she had meanwhile got hold of a weapon, a broomstick or something of the sort,—and blow followed blow. A couple of half-strangled screams from a throat constricted by the dread of death, and then nothing more.

A couple of prentices who had just come home stood down in the dark doorway and looked on; they did not move a finger to help the girl. Perhaps they did not dare; perhaps, too, they were led by a faint hope of seeing their mistress carried off in a police wagon some day.

When Mrs. Wetzmann went into the house after exercising her right of mastery—for she felt by instinct that she naturally had proprietary right to all over whom she could and would exercise it—she stumbled against something soft in the stairway. It was Frederick. He had heard the faint screams, had sprung from bed and gone out, and had fallen on the stairs.