The Glahn family can go on advertising as long as they please for Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, who disappeared; but he will never come back. He is dead, and, what is more, I know how he died.

To tell the truth, I am not surprised that his people should still keep on seeking information; for Thomas Glahn was in many ways an uncommon and likable man. I admit this, for fairness’ sake, and despite the fact that Glahn is still repellant to my soul, so that the bare memory of him arouses hatred. He was a splendidly handsome man, full of youth, and with an irresistible manner. When he looked at you with his hot animal eyes, you could not but feel his power; even I felt it so. A woman, they say, said: “When he looks at me, I am lost; I feel a sensation as if he were touching me.”

But Thomas Glahn had his faults, and I have no intention of hiding them, seeing that I hate him. He could at times be full of nonsense like a child, so kindly natured was he; and perhaps it was that which made him so irresistible to women. God knows! He could chat with them and laugh at their senseless twaddle; and so he made an impression. Once, speaking of a very corpulent man in the place, he said that he looked as if he went about with his breeches full of lard. And he laughed at that joke himself, though I should have been ashamed of it. Another time, after we had come to live in the same house together, he showed his foolishness in an unmistakable way. My landlady came in one morning and asked what I would have for breakfast, and in my hurry I happened to answer: “A bread and a slice of egg.” Thomas Glahn was sitting in my room at the time — he lived in the attic up above, just under the roof — and he began to chuckle and laugh childishly over my little slip of the tongue. “A bread and a slice of egg!” he repeated time over and over, until I looked at him in surprise and made him stop.

Maybe I shall call to mind other ridiculous traits of his later on. If so, I will write them down too, and not spare him, seeing that he is still my enemy. Why should I be generous? But I will admit that he talked nonsense only when he was drunk. But is it not a great mistake to be drunk at all?

When I first met him, in the autumn of 1859, he was a man of two-and-thirty — we were of an age. He wore a full beard at that time, and affected woolen sports shirts with an exaggerated lowness of neck; not content with that, he sometimes left the top button undone. His neck appeared to me at first to be remarkably handsome; but little by little he made me his deadly............