“I live! I live!”
Then he folded his hands and murmured, softly,
“O mother, you should have lived to see this!” And as he said so it suddenly occurred to him that this, too, was useless—that death was upon him also, crying into his ear,
“You will die! will die! before having lived.”
“I have still work to do,” he said, with moist eyes. “First, I will see my sisters happy, for if they remain poor they will be treated brutally; then I must see the farm right itself; then death may come.”
And, like the black clouds around, years and years of struggling and years of care rose up before his eyes.
With sleepy faces the inmates appeared at the gate of the shed; the sisters came, too, and stood anxiously clinging to each other, in the smoke and the glow of the fire, looking in their white dressing-gowns like two pale roses on the same stalk.
“Here your future is being prepared, you poor things,” he murmured, nodding to them.
When the foreman had come, Paul went into his father’s bedroom, who stared at him confusedly.
“Father,” he said, modestly, though his heart swelled with pride, “the locomobile is in working order; as soon as the ground has thawed the work on the moor can begin.”