"How so?" asked Bräsig, and was going to pretend great ignorance; but the Frau Pastorin was too much provoked with him, for she thought he had treated her shamefully, and she said:
"You need not pretend; I know that you know everything, and you tell me nothing!" and now she began to tap the old man, and the little assessor also bored away at the Herr Assessor; finer and finer the two women drew their threads, and got everything out of Bräsig that he knew, for silence was by no means a special gift of his, and when he at last cried out in sheer despair: "So, now I know nothing more," then the little round Frau Pastorin placed herself before him, saying, "Bräsig, I know you, I see it in your face, you know something more. Out with it! What else do you know?"
"Frau Pastorin, it is a private affair."
"That is all the same; out with it!"
And Bräsig shoved about in his chair and looked right and left, but there was no help for it, he must surrender, and he said finally, "I have written about it to Herr Franz von Rambow, at Paris; but Karl Habermann must never know it."
"To Paris!" cried the Frau Pastorin, putting her hands on her sides, "to the young Herr von Rambow! What have you written to him? You have written something about Louise, I see it in your face! Yes, you have written something, and what I would hardly dream of, you have done!" She rang the bell violently: "Fika, run to the post-office, the Herr Postmaster shall give you back, immediately, the letter that Herr Bräsig has written to Paris."
Tereng-tereng-tereng-tentereng! blew the postillion, and the post with Bräsig's letter drove by, with flourish of trumpets, before the Frau Pastorin's nose, express for Paris, and the Frau Pastorin in, great vexation, sank back in her sofa-corner, sent Fika back to the kitchen, and--alas! that we should have to confess it--she was almost ready to murmur against providence, that, perhaps for the first time, the Rahnstadt post had started at the right moment, to take Bräsig's stupid letter to Paris.
Bräsig declared, most solemnly, that he had managed the business with the greatest delicacy, so that there was not the least indicium to be perceived.
"Did you send greeting from her?" asked the Frau Pastorin.
"No," said Bräsig, "I only said she was very well."