that time to this. Now he thought about it with an intensity of remembrance.
Brand told Elsa von Kreuzenach that he had found the box in No Man's Land.
"It is my brother Heinrich's," she cried. "I gave it to him."
She drew back, shivering, from the cigarette-case—or was it from Brand? When she spoke next it was in a whisper.
"Did you kill him?"
Brand lied to her, and she knew he was lying. She wept bitterly and when Brand kissed her she was cold, and fainted in his arms.
That was Brand's story, and it was incredible. Even now I cannot help thinking that such a coincidence could not have happened. There is plenty of room for doubt about that cigarette-case. It was of a usual pattern, plain, with a wreath engraved round a monogram. That monogram H. v. K. was astonishing in relation to Elsa von Kreuzenach, but there are thousands of Germans, I imagine, with the same initials. I know two, Hermann von Kranitz and Hans von Kurtheim. In a German directory I have found many other names with those initials. I refuse to believe that Brand should have gone straight to the house of that boy whom he had killed in No Man's Land.
He believed it, and Elsa was sure of it. That was the tragedy, and the ghost of the girl's dead brother stood between them now.
For an hour or more, he paced up and down my room in an agony of mind, and none of my arguments would convince him or comfort him.
Several times he spoke one sentence which puzzled me.
"It makes no difference," he said. "It makes no difference."
