“Thieves were after the apples,” replied Paul.
The twins had red, swollen eyes, and did not dare to raise them from the ground.
“So that’s how fallen girls look,” thought Paul, and promised to be as strict with them as a jailer. But when he spoke harshly to them for the first time, and they looked up at him with a pained, humble glance, like two penitent Magdalenes, he was so much overcome by pity that he folded them weeping in his arms, and said, “Compose yourselves, children; all will yet be well.”
He was under the firm conviction that the two Erdmanns would not let the day pass without coming to the Haidehof. “Their consciences will bring them,” he said to himself. He felt so sure of it that after dinner he strongly urged his father, who in his laziness had become very slovenly, to put on his new coat, as visitors of importance were expected. His father yielded, grumbling, and was doubly angry afterwards when he found that the immense exertion had been quite useless.
“They will come to-morrow,” said Paul to himself when he went to bed; “they have not had the courage to-day.”
But the next day passed, too, without anybody appearing, and so the whole week went by.
Paul ran about the house as if distracted. Every ten minutes he was to be seen standing at the gate and looking out over the heath, so that the servants nudged one another and began to whisper all sorts of nonsense.
“It is a pity,” he said to himself, “that I am still so innocent, and have not the least experience in love matters; otherwise I should know what I ought to do.”
An agonizing fear began to master him, and he tossed about in his bed unable to sleep.
“I must make matters easy for them,” he thought one morning, and ordered the basket carriage, which a short time ago he had bought at an auction, to be got ready, and drove to Lotkeim, the Erdmanns’ estate, which they kept up together since their parents’ death.