"Leave Ella alone!" said he in that half-angry, half-compassionate tone with which one rejects the interference of a child, "you know nothing is to be done with her, and what could she effect here?"
He shrugged his shoulders and continued bitterly; "That is the reward for the sacrifice of adopting my brother's orphan children! Hugo throws all gratitude, all reason and education in my face, and runs away secretly; and Reinhold, who has grown up in my house, under my eyes, causes me the greatest anxiety, with his good-for-nothing hankering after all fancies. But with him, at all events, I have kept the reins in my hand, and I shall draw them so tightly now, that he shall lose all inclination to chafe against them any more."
"Yes, Hugo's ingratitude was really outrageous!" Frau Almbach joined in. "To fly from our house at night, in a fog, and go to sea, 'to try his luck alone in the world,' as he said in the impudent letter of farewell which he left behind him! Two years since there actually came a letter to Reinhold from the Captain; and the former hinted only lately, quite openly, about his probable return. I fear he knows something positive about it."
"Hugo shall not cross my threshold," declared the merchant, with a solemn motion of his hand. "I know nothing of this interchange of letters with Reinhold, and will know nothing. Let them correspond behind my back, but if the unadvised youth should have the audacity to appear before me, he will learn what the anger of an offended uncle and guardian is."
While the parents prepared to discuss this apparently often-treated theme, with the wonted details and ire, Ella had left the room unnoticed and now descended the staircase leading to the office, situated on the ground floor. The young wife knew that now, at midday, all the people would be absent, and this probably lent her courage to enter.
It was a large gloomy room; whose bare walls and barred windows caused it somewhat to resemble a prison. No trouble had been taken to impart any comfort or even a pleasant appearance to the office. And what for? What belonged to work was there; the rest was luxury, and luxury was a thing that the house of Almbach and Co., notwithstanding its notoriously not inconsiderable wealth, did not allow itself.
At present no one was to be found in the room, excepting the young man, who sat at a desk with a big ledger open before him. He looked pale and as if he had been up late; his eyes, which should have been busy with figures, were fixed on the narrow strip of the sun's rays which fell slantingly across the room. In his gaze was something of the longing and bitterness of a prisoner, to whom the sunshine, penetrating into his cell, brings news of life and freedom from without. He hardly turned his head at the opening of the door, and asked indifferently--
"What is it? What do you want, Ella?"
Every other wife at the second question would have gone to her husband and put her arm round his shoulder. Ella remained standing close to the doorway. It sounded far too icily cold, this "What do you want?" she evidently was not welcome.
"I wished to ask how your headache is?" she began, shyly.