nominal member of the "Teachers' Union," withdrew his membership—and there, so many thought, he might well have let the matter rest.
But whether it was that in his seclusion he did not know the goodwill he inspired in higher quarters; that he thought his prospects more hopeless than they were; that he could not stand idleness, unreconciled as he was to the premature loss of his beloved class; that the expression "dishonourable" poisoned his blood, or that his mind was not strong enough to stand all the shocks it received at this time: five weeks after the New Year his landlady found him on the threadbare carpet of his room, no greener than usual, but with a bullet through his heart.
Such was the end of Raoul Ueberbein, such his false step, such the cause of his fall. "I told you so," was the burden of all the discussions of his pitiful break-down. The quarrelsome and uncongenial man, who had never been a man amongst men at his club, who had haughtily resisted all familiarity, and had ordered his life cold-bloodedly with a view to results alone, and had supposed that that gave him the right to patronize the whole world—there he lay now: the first hitch, the first obstacle in the field of accomplishment, had brought him to a miserable end. Few of the bourgeois regretted, none of them mourned him—with one single exception, the chief surgeon at the Dorothea Hospital, Ueberbein's congenial friend, and perhaps a fair lady with whom he used once to play Casino. But Klaus Heinrich always cherished an honourable and cordial memory of his ill-fated tutor.
