Leuthold looked at her like a man awakened from a dream. "What is it?" he inquired.
"I want to know what is to be done?" she replied angrily.
Leuthold laid the child, who had fallen asleep upon his shoulder, on the sofa.
"Oh, yes, with regard to our separation."
"I suppose you had entirely forgotten it."
"I confess that I was thinking of something else at the moment; but the matter is very simple. Go to your father and effect a reconciliation with him. Gretchen will stay with me. You are free to go and come as you please. If you find that you cannot do without the child, in a few weeks you can return, if you choose. It would, at all events, be better for you to be away for awhile until I have rearranged my miserable affairs. I am going now to hear the will read. If I am appointed Ernestine's guardian, my life will be connected for the future with that of my ward." He suddenly gazed into vacancy, as if struck by a new idea, then started and seized his hat. "Yes, yes, I must go. Perhaps I am guardian!" And he turned away.
Bertha called after him, "Then I may get ready to go?"
"Do just as you please," he replied, turning upon the threshold with all the old courtesy, and then disappeared. Bertha went to her wardrobe and began to collect her possessions. "I am rightly paid for leaving a good head-waiter in the lurch for the sake of a fine doctor. If I had married Fritz, I should now have been the landlady of a hotel, while, the wife of a doctor, I don't know where to lay my head!" She looked across the room at the sleeping child. "If I only had not that child, I should be easier! But, then, it is his child. She loves him far better than me. It will be just like him one day, and a sorrow to me," she muttered. Then, as if the last thought were repented of as soon as conceived, she hastened up to Gretchen, and, weeping, kissed her pure white forehead. "No, no, you cannot help me!" she sobbed, and snatched the child to her broad breast.