Gerhardt looked at her and rose. He was a man with the Calvin type of face, rather spare, with skin sallow and discolored as the result of age and work in the wind and rain. When he was surprised or angry sparks of light glittered in his eyes. He frequently pushed his hair back when he was troubled, and almost invariably walked the floor; just now he looked alert and dangerous.
“What is that you say?” he inquired in German, his voice straining to a hard note. “In trouble—has some one—” He paused and flung his hand upward. “Why don’t you speak?” he demanded.
“I never thought,” went on Mrs. Gerhardt, frightened, and yet following her own train of thought, “that anything like that would happen to her. She was such a good girl. Oh!” she concluded, “to think he should ruin Jennie.”
“By thunder!” shouted Gerhardt, giving way to a fury of feeling, “I thought so! Brander! Ha! Your fine man! That comes of letting her go running around at nights, buggy-riding, walking the streets. I thought so. God in heaven!—”
He broke from his dramatic attitude and struck out in a fierce stride across the narrow chamber, turning like a caged animal.
“Ruined!” he exclaimed. “Ruined! Ha! So he has ruined her, has he?”
Suddenly he stopped like an image jerked by a string. He was directly in front of Mrs. Gerhardt, who had retired to the table at the side of the wall, and was standing there pale with fear.
“He is dead now!” he shouted, as if this fact had now first occurred to him. “He is dead!”
He put both hands to his temples, as if he feared his brain would give way, and stood looking at her, the mocking irony of the situation seeming to burn in his brain like fire.
“Dead!” he repeated, and Mrs. Gerhardt, fearing for the reason of the man, shrank still farther away, her wits taken up rather with the tragedy of the figure he presented than with the actual substance of his woe.