Every now and again I nodded and said quietly: “But I know you did it.”

‘After a while he did calm down. I went on smiling. I had the feeling that I could turn him into the thief just with that smile, even if he hadn’t been the one. “And,” I thought, “there’s plenty of time to put it right.”

‘After a few minutes, during which he stole occasional glances at me, he suddenly turned pale. A curious change occurred in his face. It lost its innocent, beautiful charm - it had drained away with the colour. Now it looked greenish, cheesy, swollen. I had only ever seen anything like that once before - when I was walking along the street just as they arrested a murderer. He too had been walking among the other people, and no one could have spotted anything special about him. But when the policeman put his hand on his shoulder, he suddenly became a different person. His face was transformed, and his eyes stared in terror, searching for some kind of escape route; he had the face of a hanged man.

‘The change in Basini’s expression reminded me of that; I knew everything now, and all I had to do was wait ...

‘And wait I did. I didn’t have to say a word, and Basini-exhausted by the silence — began to cry and beg me for mercy. He had only taken the money out of desperation; if I hadn’t spotted it, he would have returned it so quickly that no one would have known about it. So I shouldn’t say that he’d stolen; he had only borrowed it secretly ... he couldn’t get any further for weeping.

‘But then he started pleading once more. He would be obedient to me, do anything I wanted, only I mustn’t tell anyone about it. For that price he was practically offering himself to me as a slave, and the mixture of cunning and greedy fear that wriggled into his eyes was disgusting. So I just promised him curtly that I would give some thought to what was going to happen to him, but said that this was primarily a matter for Beineberg. So what, in your opinion, should we do with him?’

While Reiting was talking, Törless had been listening in silence, eyes closed. From time to time he had shivered to his fingertips, and thoughts rose to the surface in his head, as wild and disorganized as bubbles in boiling water. It is said that this is what happens when we have our first glimpse of the woman who will draw us into a devastating passion. It is claimed that there is just such a moment of stooping, of summoning our strength, holding our breath, a moment of outward silence above the greatest internal tension that exists between two human beings. There is no way of saying what takes place in that moment. It is, so to speak, the shadow that passion casts ahead of itself. An organic shadow; a relaxation of all earlier tensions and at the same time a new and sudden state of bondage which contains the whole of the future; an incubation concentrated on the point of a needle ... And on the other hand it is a nothing, a dull, vague feeling, a weakness, an anxiety ...

That was how Törless felt. If he thought about it, what Reiting was saying about himself and Basini seemed to him to be of no importance. A thoughtless offence, a cowardly misdeed by Basini, which was sure to be followed by some cruel caprice on the part of Reiting. On the other hand, however, he felt with anxious apprehension that events had now taken a quite personal turn against him, and that there was something in the incident that threatened him, like a sharp-pointed weapon.

He couldn’t help imagining Basini at Božena’s, and looked around the room. Its walls seemed to threaten him, to sink down upon him, to reach out to him as though with bloody hands, and the revolver rocked back and forth where it hung ...

Something had dropped for the first time like a stone into the vague loneliness of his daydreams; it was there; there was nothing to be done about it; it was reality.