"No."
"Haven't you the least bit of love left for me?"
He saw her pleading eyes, her quivering lips, and for a moment he was moved to sorrow, but the rising emotion was extinguished instantly, like a lighted match in a water-butt.
"Leave me alone," he said. "I want nothing but to live in my own way, and not to be too intimate with any one," and he turned his back.
She stroked his sleeve twice, thrice, and with this timid endearment slipped quietly away.
The next moment he heard her scolding the lady's maid because she had not ironed a strip of tulle properly.
"Fortunately things don't go very deeply with her," he thought. And then he was filled with disgust at his own conduct. Was he going to sacrifice his mother, too, to that nameless ghost of the past?
The big covered sleigh came round at seven o'clock, and half an hour later he followed it, in a small sleigh with one horse, as usual driving himself. A pale moonlight illumined the white expanse of snow from which the peasants' huts and farm-buildings rose in shapeless masses of shadow. The distance was enshrouded in a milky haze, setting the groups of trees in silver.
The road lay on this side of the river, but passed through Wengern and close by the ferry. Two sleighs belonging to distinguished company had just been deposited here as he came up, and he heard the music of their bells as they rattled on ahead of him. He would have known the tone of the Uhlenfelde sleigh-bells amongst a thousand, and he was satisfied that they were not amongst these. Would she be there? Would she be there?
And he stretched himself, for he was stiff and cramped with suspense. But when he reached the stables certainty awaited him. There stood the Kletzingks' old Wilhelm, touching his cap to him with the familiar grin which is permissible from the servants of a friendly house. It occurred to him that, after all, Ulrich might have come too, and the thought filled him with alarm. He would have liked to ask, but an undefinable feeling of shame stifled the words in his throat.