“No, we’re just going. We came in for a moment to warm ourselves. It’s getting late, so we must hurry.” Lucy smiled at Adelheid and patted her shoulder, feeling sorry and uncomfortable. “Promise to let me know, Frau, if Friedrich is worse?”
“Yes, many thanks,” nodded Trudchen, following Lucy and Alan to the door, Franz silently bringing up the rear.
Once outside the cottage and walking fast across the twilit clearing, Lucy poured out upon Alan a flood of reproaches. “I don’t think you should have talked so, Alan. He offered us hospitality and it was no time to ask questions. If he is innocent you were wrong to insult him.”
When Alan could get in a word he said, glancing with some amusement at Lucy’s disapproving face, “Look at it from another point of view, Lucy, before you go for me like that. If he is innocent I didn’t insult him, for my questions could hold no offense. If he is guilty his villainy—whatever on earth it is—deserves to be ferreted out, even at the cost of making him burn a few extra pine logs or of hurting his wife’s feelings. Which is more important, that peace should not be delayed, or that Franz should not be offended?”
“Oh, Alan, how could he delay peace? What an imagination you have!” cried Lucy, exasperated.
“Right-o. If he has no bad intentions then I didn’t offend him. So what’s the row?”
“It’s impossible to argue with you,” declared Lucy, silenced against her will.
Once in the hospital she described all the afternoon’s events to Bob. When she finished with an account of Alan’s questions to Franz, to her satisfaction Bob promptly agreed with her that Alan had acted wrongly. However, she learned at her brother’s first words that he did not actually share her own view.
“I think you should have held your tongue, Alan,” he told the Britisher, staring out, as he spoke, from the hospital window into the shadowy forest. “I’d go any lengths to get the truth out of Franz, but what you did was to rouse his suspicions and discover nothing that will help us at all.”
“His suspicions were already aroused,” Alan protested. “Otherwise why did he spy on us and invite us in with such false civility?”