“Yes that is true!” she answered, made the driver stop, and beckoned to Paul. But the old man, who, in his distrust, always liked to hear everything that was said, thrust himself in, and so they had to leave it unsaid.
When Paul, on his usual evening round, came into the kitchen, he saw how his father was negotiating with the house keeper for an earthen pot.
“What do you want the pot for, Mr Meyerhofer?” asked the old woman.
“I also am going to celebrate polterabend, Frau Jankus,” he replied, with a hollow laugh. “Perhaps they will give me some of the wedding cake.”
The old woman nearly died of laughing, and his father limped off to his bedroom with the pot, locking the door carefully behind him.
The whole house had retired to rest, only Paul still paced up and down in the dark yard.
“So to morrow will be her wedding,” he thought, folding his hands “If I were a good Christian I ought to say a prayer for her happiness. But I am not such an inert fellow yet, by a long way I believe that I once loved her very much, more than I knew myself. How can it have been that I became a stranger to her?” He thought and thought, but could come to no right conclusion.
The moon rose over the moor—a great blood red disk—which spread an uncertain light all over the yard. The storm seemed to be augmenting. It whistled round the corners and howled through the trees.
“If a fire were to break out to day it would not content itself with the barn only,” thought Paul and then it occurred to him that he must send a reminder to the agent, to hasten the insurance. “For one never knows what might happen during the night. I will go to sleep”—he concluded his reflections—“to morrow is another day, and a wedding day, too.”
He went on tiptoe to the bedroom, which he had prepared for himself near that of his fathers, so as to be at hand if anything should happen to the old man. He lighted no candle, for the full moon, rising higher, already shone brightly into the room.