“Vögelein, don’t you know me?”
The girl, in nowise startled, gravely set her flickering candle on the door-step, looked up at him wonderingly, as if he were an exhibition, and said she thought not, unless he had been asleep on the table.
“Good heavens!” cried Ronald, “can this child talk of nothing but people asleep on a table?”
But, as he spoke, a thought whirred through his brain. He drew the poor half-witted thing close to him and asked:
“Can Vögelein tell me something about mamma, and how she went to sleep?”
The child rambled on, pleased to find a listener to her foolish prattle. All he could connect into a narrative was, that the girl’s mother, some seven or eight years before, had been drained of her life by the awful magnet, and that, as the child said, “the Herr Doctor ever since had talked just like mamma.”
His dread was well founded, then. The old man’s one dream and aim was to prolong his wretched life; could he doubt that he would not now make use of the means he had so unwisely thrown in his way? He turned about, half maddened.
“Girl!” he cried, “I must see the old man! Where is he?”
He couldn’t see him, she whined. He was asleep up there, on the table. At one o’clock he had said he would wake up.
He pushed past her, mounted to the long room, pressed open the unfastened door, and entered.