She put her feeble hand on the little head of the new-born child, who with his little serious face was quietly dozing, hid her face in her pillow and wept.
After a while she said to the servant who attended the little one,
“Tell your master I want to speak to him.”
And he came. With loud steps he approached the bed of the sick woman, and looked at her with a face that seemed doubly distorted and desperate in his endeavor to look unconcerned.
“Max,” she said, timidly, for she always feared him—“Max, don’t hide anything from me; I am prepared for the worst, anyhow.”
“Are you?” he asked, distrustfully, for he remembered the doctor’s warning.
“When have we to go?”
As he saw that she took their misfortune so calmly, he thought it no longer necessary to be careful, and broke out, with an oath:
“To-day—to-morrow—just as it pleases the new owner. By his charity only we are still here, and, if it pleased him, we might have to lodge in the streets this very night.”
“It won’t be as bad as that, Max,” she said, painfully striving to keep her composure, “if he hears that, only a few days ago, a little one arrived—”