"Start?" he repeated absently. "Why should you start?"
"Oh, Robert—I can't get there if I don't start."
"Get where, Ingeborg?" he asked, his eyes on hers but his thoughts in unimaginable distances.
"Oh, Robert—but to Berlin, of course."
"Berlin. Yes. Very well. Berlin."
And, deeply turning over the new and pregnant possibilities suggested to him by what he had just been reading, he went out.
CHAPTER XXXII
As though to assure her of what she already knew, that she was on the threshold of the most glorious ten days of her life, the world when she looked out of the window next morning was radiant with sunshine and sparkling with freshness. Far away on the edge of Russia the great rain clouds that had come up to Kökensee from the west and folded it for two days in a stupor of mist were disappearing in one long purple line. The garden glistened and laughed. Sweet fragrances from the responsive earth hurried to meet the sun like eager kisses. If she had needed reassuring, this happy morning warm and scented would have done it; but now that the night was over, a time when those who are going to have doubts do have them, and the dark sodden days when if facts are going to be blurred they are blurred, she felt no scruples nor any misgivings—she had simply got to the beginning of the most wonderful holiday of her life.
Everything was easy. Robert went away after an early breakfast to his fields to see the improvement forty-eight hours' soaking must have made, and obviously did not mind her impending departure in the least; one of the horses, till lately lame, was recovered, Karl told her, and able to take her in to Meuk; the servant Klara seemed proud to be left in sole charge; the train left Meuk so conveniently that she would have time to visit Robertlet and Ditti on the way. Singing she packed her smallest trunk; singing she thrust money from the cupboard where it had so long lain useless into her blouse—one, two, three, ten blue German notes of a hundred marks each—while she wondered, but not much, if it would be enough, and wondered, but equally not much, if it would be too little; singing she pinned on unfamiliar objects such as a hat and veil, and sought out gloves; singing she handed over the keys to Klara; singing she stood on the steps watching Karl harness the horses. All the birds of Kökensee were singing, too, and the pig sunning itself in a thick ecstasy of appreciation also sang according to its lights, and it was not its fault, she thought excusingly, if what happened when it sang was that it grunted.