“Where are you going?” asked the old man.
“I want to see a little of the German Empire,” replied Daniel. “I have some business to attend to up in the North, in the cities and also out in the country.”
“Good luck to you,” said Jordan, much oppressed, “good luck to you, my dear son. How long are you going to be gone?”
“Oh, I don’t know yet; possibly for years.”
“For years?” asked Jordan. He looked at the floor; he tried to keep his eyes on the floor under his feet: “Then I suppose we might as well say good-bye forever.”
Daniel shook his head. “It makes no difference when I return, I will find you here,” he said with a note of strange assurance in his voice. “When fate has treated a man too harshly, there seems to come a time when it no longer bothers him; it evades him, in fact. It seems to me that this is the case with you: you are quite fateless.”
Jordan made no reply. He opened his eyes as if in fear, and sighed.
The next morning Daniel left home. He wore a brown hunting jacket buttoned close up to his neck with hartshorn buttons. Over this hung a top-coat and a cape. His broad-brimmed hat overshadowed his face, which looked young, although so serious and distracted that voices, glances, and sounds of any kind seemed to rebound from it like swift-running water from a smooth stone wall.
Philippina carried his luggage to the station. Her dress was literally smothered in garish, gaudy ribbons. The women in the market-place laughed on seeing her until they got a colic.
When Daniel took leave from her and boarded the train, she did not open her mouth; she wrinkled her forehead, rubbed the ends of her fingers against each other, stood perfectly quiet, and looked at the ground. Long after the train had left the station, she was still to be seen standing there in that unique position. A station official went up to her, and, with poorly concealed ridicule at the rare phenomenon, asked her what she was waiting for.