“Why did they not let that beast be burned?”
But Paul loved her in his heart only the more tenderly. “Now would be the time for you to come to life again,” he said, and pulled out the wheel and looked into the boiler. He began to cut little models of lime-wood in the evenings, and one day he wrote to Gottfried:
“Send me a few books out of the school-library on the working of steam-engines. I feel as if much depended on them for our home.”
Gottfried was solicited in vain. In the first place, it went against his principles to take books from the library which he did not use himself; and, secondly, they would not be of any good to Paul, as he was not up in the theory of physics. Then he wrote to Max. The latter immediately sent him a packet, weighing ten pounds, of brand-new volumes, enclosing a bill for fifty marks. He decided to keep the books and slowly to save up the fifty marks. “Nothing is too dear for ‘Black Susy,’” he said.
But fresh cause for uneasiness was to befall him.
One morning a carriage came driving up to the farm, in which two unknown gentlemen were sitting with a gendarme, one of whom, a comfortable-looking man, of about forty years old, wearing golden spectacles on his nose, introduced himself as a police-magistrate.
Paul was terrified, for he felt very well that he had been concealing many things.
The magistrate first examined the scene of the fire, took a sketch of the foundations, and asked where the doors and windows had been; then he had all the servants called out, whom he questioned most closely as to what they had done on the day before, and up to the moment when the fire had broken out.
Paul stood near him, pale and trembling, and when the magistrate dismissed the servants to examine Paul himself, he felt as if the end of the world had come.
“Were you in the barn the day before the fire?” the magistrate asked.