"Oh?" she said. "But isn't that—wouldn't that be rather—"
"Why can't you be as simple as when you went to Lucerne? You wanted to go, so you went. And you were leaving your father who tremendously needed you. You were his right hand. Here you're nobody's right hand. I'm not asking you to do anything that would hurt Robert. All you've got to do is to arrange so that he knows nothing beyond Berlin. Surely after these years he can let you go away for ten days?"
She walked with him in silence down the lilac path as far as the gate into the yard. She was exalted, but her exaltation was shot with doubt. What he said sounded so entirely right, so obviously right. She had no reasoning to put up against it. She longed intolerably to go. She was quite certain it was a high and beautiful thing to go. And yet—
Herr Dremmel's laboratory windows were open, for the evening was heavy and quiet, and they could see him in the lamplight, with disregarded moths fluttering round his head, bent over his work.
"Good night," Ingram called in at the window with the peculiar cordial voice reserved for husbands; but Herr Dremmel was too much engrossed to hear.
Towards two o'clock there was a thunderstorm and sheets of rain, and when Ingeborg got up next morning it was to find the summer gone. The house was cold and dark and mournful, and it was raining steadily. Looking out of the front door at the yard that had been so bright and dusty for five weeks she thought she had never seen such a sudden desolation. The rain rained on the ivy with a drawn-out dull dripping. The pig standing solitary in the mud was the wettest pig. The puddles were all over little buttons made of raindrops. Invariably after a thunderstorm the weather broke up for days, sometimes for weeks. What would she and Ingram do now? she thought; what in the world would they do now? Shut up in the dark little parlour, he unable to work, and no walks, and no punting—why, he'd go, of course, and the wonder-time was at an end.
"A week of this," said Herr Dremmel, coming out of his laboratory to stand on the doorstep and rub his hands in satisfaction, "a week of this will save the situation."
"Which situation, Robert?" she asked, her mind as confused and dull as the untidy grey sky. He looked at her.
"Oh, yes," she said hastily, "of course—the experiment fields. Yes, I suppose this is what they've been wanting all through that heavenly weather."
"It was a weather," said Herr Dremmel, "that had nothing to do with heaven and everything to do with hell. Devils no doubt might grow in it, wax fat and big and heavy-eared, devils used to drought, but certainly not the kindly fruits of the earth."