Reinhold made no answer. What reply should he make? How could he hope to come to an understanding with a man whose views about everything were diametrically opposed to his own, who pushed his opinions to the last extremity, never making a concession even to a guest who, only an hour before, had been received with such cordiality as a father displays toward his own son returning from abroad?
"Perhaps you have caused a rupture with him for all time," thought Reinhold. "It is too bad; but you cannot yield, bound hand and foot, unconditionally, to the old tyrant! If you cannot possibly touch chords which awaken a friendly response in his hard soul, let the ladies try to do so—and indeed that is their office."
Aunt Rikchen had evidently read the thought from his face. She answered his silent appeal with one of her sharp, swift, furtive glances, and with light shrugs of her shoulders, as if to say—"He's always so! It can't be helped." Ferdinande seemed not to notice the interruption. She continued to gaze straight ahead, as she had done during the entire meal, with a strange, distracted, gloomy expression, and did not now stir as her aunt, bending toward her, said a few words in a low tone. Uncle Ernst, who was just about to fill his empty glass again, set down the bottle he had raised.
"I have asked you a thousand times, Rike, to stop that abominable whispering. What is the matter now?"
A swift flush of anger passed over Aunt Rikchen's wrinkled old-maidish face, as the distasteful name "Rike" fell upon her ear; but she answered in a tone of resigned indifference, in which she was accustomed to reply to the reprimand of her brother, "Nothing at all! I only asked Ferdinande if Justus was not coming this evening."
"Who is Justus?" asked Reinhold, glad that some other subject had been broached.
"Rike is fond of speaking of people in the most familiar way," said Uncle Ernst.
"When they half belong to the family, why not?" retorted Aunt Rikchen, who seemed determined not to be intimidated this time. "Justus, or, as Uncle Ernst will have it, Mr. Anders, is a young sculptor——"
"Of thirty and more years," said Uncle Ernst.
"Of thirty and more years, then," continued Aunt Rikchen; "more exactly, thirty-three. He has been living, who knows how long, with us——"