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her hand shookso much that although she had picked up her glass she had to put it down again in haste—she realised, to her horror, that she had left the letter lying open beside her plate. Just one small movement, and her husband could have picked it up. Maybe a glance would have been enough to read the large, unformed characters in which those few lines were written. Words failed her. Surreptitiously, she crumpled up the note, but now, as she put it in her pocket and looked up, she met her husband’s eyes bent severely on her. It was a penetrating, stern and painful glance. She had never known him to look like that before. Only now, during these last few days, had he suddenly made her feel distrustful with such an expression on his face. It shook her to the core, and she was unable to parry it. A glance like that had paralysed her in the middle of dancing, and he had watched over her sleep last night with the same look, his eyes gleaming like the blade of a knife.
    Did he know something, or did he want to know it, was that what sharpened his glance, made it so bright, so steely, so painful? And as she was still searching for something to say, a long-forgotten memory came back to her. Her husband had once told her how, as a lawyer, he had faced an investigating judge whose trick it was to look through his files during the examination as if short-sighted, but when the really important questioncame he would suddenly raise his eyes and turn their piercing gaze, like a dagger, on the suddenly alarmed defendant, who would then be discomposed by this bright lightning flash of concentrated attention, and the lie he had been carefully trying to maintain would lose its force. Could her husband be employing dangerous methods of that kind himself, and was she the victim? She shuddered, particularly because she knew what a great intellectual passion he felt for his chosen profession, far beyond that necessary for a legal career. He could track down the reasons for a crime, its development, the moment it turned to extortion, as intently as others might devote themselves to eroticism or gambling, and on a day when he was engaged in this psychological hunt he seemed to be inwardly radiant. The keen nervous energy that often made him recollect forgotten verdicts in the middle of the night expressed itself outwardly then in a steely inscrutability; he ate and drank little, but smoked the whole time, and he seemed to be saving his words for the coming hour in court. She had once gone to hear him make a plea, and never went again, she was so shaken by the dark passion and almost malevolent fire of his delivery and the sombre, austere expression on his face. Now she suddenly thought she detected the same look again in his fixed gaze under those menacingly frowning brows.
    All these lost memories came crowding in on her in that single second, and kept her lips from uttering the words that they were trying to form. She said nothing, and became increasingly confused the more she realised how dangerous her silence was—she was losing her last plausible chance of explaining herself. She dared not raise her eyes, yet now, looking down, she was even more alarmed to see his hands, usually so still and steady, moving up and down on the table like little wild animals. Luckily lunch was soon over, and the children jumped up and ran into the next room, chattering in their clear, cheerful voices, while the governess tried in vain to moderate their high spirits. Her husband also got to his feet, went out of the dining room, treading heavily, and did not look back.
    As soon as she was alone she took out the fateful letter again. She read the lines once more: ‘ Kindly give the bearer of this letter a hundred crowns at once .’ Then she tore it into small pieces in her rage, and was crumpling them up into a ball to throw them in the waste-paper basket when she thought better of it, stopped, leant over the stove on the hearth and threw the paper into the