"Yes, yes, the matter cannot be avoided," the Freiherr growled, and Elmhorst, glad to come to business, took up his words.
"You are quite right, Herr Baron, it will not be ignored, and on peril of your fulfilling your threat and really turning me out of doors, I must present myself to you as the agent of the railway company intrusted with imparting to you certain information. The measurements and surveys upon the Wolkenstein estate cannot possibly be delayed any longer, and the engineers will go to work here in the course of a few days."
"They will do no such thing!" Thurgau exclaimed, angrily. "How often must I repeat that I will not allow anything of the kind upon my property!"
"Upon your property? The estate is no longer your property," said Elmhorst, calmly. "The company bought it months ago, and the purchase-money has been lying ready ever since. That business was finished long ago."
"Nothing has been finished!" shouted the Freiherr, his irritation increasing. "Do you imagine I care a button for judgments that outrage all justice, and which your company procured God only knows by what rascality? Do you suppose I am going to leave my house and home to make way for your locomotives? Not one step will I stir, and if----"
"Pray do not excite yourself thus, Herr von Thurgau," Wolfgang interrupted him. "At present there is no idea of driving you away,--it is only that the preliminary surveys must be begun; the house itself will remain entirely at your disposal until next spring."
"Very kind of you!" Thurgau laughed, bitterly. "Till next spring! And what then?"
"Then, of course, it must go."
The Freiherr was about to burst forth again, but there was something in the young man's cool composure that forced him to control himself. He made an effort to do so, but his colour deepened and his breath was short and laboured, as he said, roughly,--
"Does that seem to you a matter 'of course'? But what can you know of the devotion a man feels for his inheritance? You belong, like my brother-in-law, to the century of steam. He builds himself three--four palaces, each more gorgeous than its predecessor, and in none of them is he at home. He lives in them one day and sells them the next, as the whim takes him. Wolkenstein Court has been the home of the Thurgaus for two centuries, and shall remain so until the last Thurgau closes his eyes, rely----"