"All the strength of the coffee will boil away," murmured Fico.
"Parbleu! we make new coffee for him," replied Pinac.
"He have sleep long enough. I call him," said Fico, tapping lightly on the door of the lumber room that served Von Barwig as a bedroom. Receiving no reply, Fico knocked louder. Finally he pushed open the door. It had no lock on it and the catch was broken. Fico looked into the room, shook his head and then turned and stared at his friends. "He have gone up," he said with an anxious look. "You mean he have get up," suggested Pinac. "Got up!" corrected Jenny. "Yes," replied Fico. "He is got up and out."
Poons, who had not quite followed the intricacies of the conversation, went into Von Barwig's room and satisfied himself that his beloved friend was not there. The three men stared at each other. They said nothing, but the expression on their faces denoted anxiety. "Where has he gone?" seemed to be the question each asked silently of the other.
Von Barwig had been very quiet in the past year, so quiet that his actions seemed to his friends to be almost mysterious. Not that he was more reserved than usual, but there was a calmness, a resignation to existing conditions, a listlessness that seemed to them to amount to almost a lack of interest in life, and this mental attitude on Von Barwig's part caused them no little anxiety.
"It's such an awful day," said Pinac as he looked out of the window.
"By God, yes!" assented Fico. "Another bliz."
The wind was howling up and down the streets and flurries of snow were being driven against the windows, banging the shutters to and fro as the great gusts of wind caught them in their grasp. The iron catch that held the shutter had long since been torn out by the winter blizzards, and the constant banging sound grated harshly on the sensitive ears of the musicians. Poons suffered more than the rest, and swore roundly in German every time the shutter struck against the window jamb.
"Jenny," came the shrill voice of Miss Husted up the stairway at the back of the hall. That lady was more than ever set against her niece's "taking up with a musician," as she called the love match between Poons and Jenny. Whenever Miss Husted missed Jenny on the floors below she invariably found her upstairs talking to young August.
"We were looking for the professor," said Jenny, as her aunt's head came up into view from the staircase below.