“So,” said the Master. “Mine son, is it not well with you?”
Lynn turned away to hide the working of his face. “Not very,” he answered in a low tone.
“Miss Iris,” said the Master, “she will have gone away?”
It was like the tearing of a wound. “Yes,” replied Lynn, almost in a whisper, “she went this morning.”
“And you are sad because she has gone away? I am sorry mineself. Miss Iris is one little lady.”
“Yes,” returned Lynn, clenching his hands, “she is.”
Something in the boy’s eyes stirred an old memory, and made the Master’s heart very tender toward him. “Mine son,” he said very gently, “if something has troubled you, perhaps it will give you one relief to tell me. Only yesterday Miss Iris was here. She was very sad when she came, and when she went away the world was more sunny, or so I think.”
Quickly surmising that Herr Kaufmann had something more than a hint of it, and more eager for sympathy than he realised, Lynn stammered out the story, choking at the end of it.
There was a long silence, in which the Master went back twenty-five years. Lynn’s eyes, so full of trouble, were they not like another’s, long ago? The organ-tone of the thunder once more reverberated through the forest, where the great boughs arched like the nave of a cathedral, and the dead leaves scurried in fright before the rising wind.
“That is all,” said the boy, his face white to the lips. “It is not much, but it is a great deal to me.”