Very much earlier on this same eventful night a girlish figure emerged from the door leading to Alchemist Kreutz’s lodgings on the third floor of the building where Pan Andrew lived, and stole quietly down the steps to the second floor. Here she rapped three times. In a space of perhaps a minute, the door was thrown back a little, and Joseph’s mother peered cautiously out through the crack.
“Come in, child,” she said heartily as she recognized Elzbietka’s face.
“What brings you out so late?” she inquired a moment later as she shot the heavy bolts back into place and secured the door. “Has the student Tring been troubling you or your uncle lately, or what is it? Sit there at the table where I was just finishing my sewing for the day and tell me the whole story.”
“Yes,” answered the girl, “it is the student Tring. He and uncle are in the loft now, and I am somewhat frightened—they have been talking more queerly than ever all this evening.”
“You must stay with me here this night,” the woman said. “It’s a shame that such a scholar as your uncle should have anything to do with that student, Tring. I fear that young man very much. He seems to me like one who has grown old and then become young again. When he looks at me with those great dark eyes it seems as if he were thinking of terrible things——”
“I will stay here, and gladly, mother,” she answered, for in these months of sweet acquaintanceship the affection of the woman and girl had become much like that which exists between mother and daughter, “but it is not that I fear anything, myself, from the student Tring. It is really my uncle’s conduct these few weeks that troubles me, and more especially his conduct since that night when the men came here to steal. He is so changed!”
“I have seen,” Joseph’s mother replied. “But has he ever been cruel to you?”
“Oh, no! Never that. But he is not at all as he was when we first came here to live. Then he was full of merriment, ready to talk or laugh with me, eager to go somewhere or to see something that would be of pleasure to us both. Now he does not seem to think of me, at all. He is always like one in a dream. Sometimes when I speak to him, he does not seem to hear. Other times he answers my questions queerly, saying things that I had not thought of. He is caught up in something that I fear, and something that has little good in it.”
“It’s the student Tring who has done all this.”
“Yes, I think that he has done much of it. They two are together every night, and they work together in the loft above my head. I can hear them moving about occasionally, though sometimes a terrible silence is all that there is.”