The little side-gate into the yard was not locked. Franz Vogt entered by it upon his paternal inheritance.
Just then old Wackwitz came hobbling with his wooden leg across the yard, carrying a pot of steamed potatoes.
"Nobody has any business here!" he cried out to the intruder.
Then he recognised "young Herr Vogt." He took him at once across the yard, and pointed out to him, in his clumsy, babbling way, the fine glossy appearance of the cows and the appetising sleekness of the pigs. Who could be found to take more trouble with the beasts than he? And he had been very economical with the food, although the local authorities had not given him too liberal an allowance!
Vogt listened perfunctorily. He nodded assent to all the garrulous old man said. It was quite true, the beasts looked well cared-for.
He patted the strawberry cow, who was in calf; and she turned her head towards him as she lay in her stall comfortably chewing the cud. Yet he could not feel easy. With his foot he pushed aside some straw that was littering about the place, and he carefully avoided the dung that lay on the stones of the yard.
He went down to the village and got the keys. A stuffy, chilly atmosphere met him in the passage and exhaled from every room. Thick dust lay everywhere on floors and furniture.
Nothing had been moved from its place, and every picture hung as usual on the wall. But it seemed to Vogt as if the rooms were empty and the walls bare. He shuddered with cold and with the sense of loneliness.
In the living-room his father's plain easy-chair was pushed up to the table, and beside it the stool on which the son had usually sat. It looked as if they had both only been out into the field for a moment and would return immediately; but yet he could not feel at home.
Franz Vogt looked about him sadly. All else was as of old; but his father lay in the churchyard beneath the heaped-up clay of his newly-made grave, and the son stood like a stranger in his father's house.