Wolfgang loved the sun. As he had gazed admiringly at the small copy of it when a child, the round yellow sunflower in his garden, so he still delighted in it. If the perspiration stood in drops on his brown skin, he would push his white panama hat a little further back from his forehead, but he never drew his breath more freely, easily, and felt less oppressed.
"It was splendid, pater," he said, and his eyes gleamed. "First of all I swam the whole width of the lake three times, there and back and there and back and there and back again without stopping. What do you say to that?"
"Much too tiring, very thoughtless," remarked Paul Schlieben, not without some anxiety. Indeed Hofmann was not at all anxious that the boy should swim.
"Thoughtless? Fatiguing? Ha ha!" Wolfgang thought it great fun. "That's a mere trifle to me. I've really missed my vocation, you know. You ought not to have put me into an office. I ought to have been a swimmer, a rider or--well, a cowboy in the Wild West."
He had said it in joke without meaning anything, but it seemed to the man, who suddenly looked at him with eyes that had grown suspicious, that something serious, an accusation, was concealed behind the joke. What did he want then? Did he want to gallop through life like an unrestrained boy?
"Well, your sporting capacities will be of use to you when you are a soldier," he said coolly. "At present what you have to do here is of more importance. Have you drawn up the contract for delivery for White Brothers? Show it to me."
"Directly."
Wolfgang disappeared; but it was some time before he returned. Had he only done the work now, which he had been told was urgent and was to be done carefully? The ink was still quite fresh, the writing was very careless, even if legible; it was no business hand. Schlieben frowned; he was strangely irritable to-day. At any other time he would have been struck by the celerity with which the boy had finished the work he had neglected; but to-day the careless writing, the inkspots in the margin, the slipshod manner in which it had all been done, which seemed to him to point to a want of interest, vexed him.
"Hm!" He examined it once more critically. "When did you do this?"
"When you gave me it to do." The tone in which Wolfgang said this was so unabashed that it was impossible to doubt it.