"I can promise nothing," I replied guardedly; "in an official examination one is bound to conceal nothing."
"Oh, Herr Professor, I beg, I entreat you----"
Franz interrupted her, and, casting at me a look which was almost menacing, exclaimed, "Do not say another word, Anna; the Herr Professor is right; it was folly, yes, wrong, for me to yield to your desire and make this request of the Herr Professor, who ought not to comply with it. If that scoundrel, Foligno, suspects me, I know how to meet his suspicion. Come, Anna, we ought not to detain the gentleman any longer."
He lifted his hat by way of farewell, and walked towards the forest with the young girl. My mind was filled with contradictory thoughts. Can that proud, self-assertive young man be a miserable criminal! I would so gladly have banished all suspicion of him, but--how terrible it was that so lovely and charming a girl had perhaps bestowed the wealth of her affection upon her father's murderer!
I walked slowly towards the Lonely House, where the Captain, sitting before the door, was awaiting me. He handed me the letter for his brother, gave me various verbal commissions, and I left with a promise to visit him shortly in the Lonely House.
"Shall I bring the Herr Professor's lunch into the garden?" Mizka asked me as I entered the kitchen of the Golden Vine on my return from my excursion. "The Judge has been lunching in the garden, and is sitting with his coffee beneath the great linden."
The Ophrys Bertolini occurred to me. I smiled at the remembrance of the Judge's boast and was pleased at the idea of teasing him. Of course I ordered my lunch in the garden and betook myself thither.
The Judge was sipping his coffee and smoking his long cigar at the round table beneath the spreading linden. He seemed sunk in a profound reverie, leaning his head upon his hand and with downcast eyes. I was struck with his pallor and with the sallowness and the drawn look of his features. At my first words he started violently, and for a moment gazed at me with terror, almost as if awaking from an oppressive dream, but in an instant he recovered his self-control, and greeted me with a smile.
"I think I was dozing," he said; "the terrible heat makes me sleepy."
Why should he have told such an untruth? He had not been dozing; just before he started he had raised his hand to his cigar and had taken a long whiff.