"By George! It's the Herr Rathsherr," cried Fritz Sahlmann.
Mamsell Westphalen stood there like Lot's wife--only that she was perhaps stouter--and looked at the Rathsherr as if he were Sodom and Gomorrah.
"Merciful heavens! We are all wandering in the dark," she said in a feeble voice.
"It's very well for you to talk of wandering in the dark," sputtered my uncle Herse. "You can see, but I can't open my eyes. Get me some water."
Now began a scene of washing, and rubbing, and pitying, and wondering, and scolding, and consoling; but my uncle was still angry, and said that all the women in the Schloss might be hanged for what he cared, it would be a long time before he was caught entering into secret conspiracies with women again. Mamsell Westphalen held her apron up to her eyes and began to cry:
"Herr Rathsherr," she said, "tell me what I ought to do. I have no father or mother left and, I after last night, I couldn't let myself be seen by the Herr Amtshauptmann. You are the only one I can look to for help now."
My uncle Herse had a heart, a soft heart; my uncle Herse had a soul, a tender soul; and, when he had quite got the ashes out of his eyes, and Mamsell Westphalen had rubbed cold cream on the scratches in his face till it looked like a red and white toadstool, he said kindly:
"Leave off crying. I will help you. You must take to flight."
"Take to flight!" she exclaimed and looked in a puzzled way at her figure from head to foot; "Do you mean me to take to flight?"
And she thought of the pigeons up in her pigeon-house; and if the matter had not been too serious for her, she would almost have laughed.