with Lenz and Petrowitsch.

Lenz bruised the coffee beans, which were part of the present brought
by Ernestine the grocer's wife; and again they all sat together by the
light of the feeble blue flame. The coffee cheered them all. The clock
struck. Annele said she had not tried to count the strokes, she would
ask no more whether it were day or night; they would at all events live
together in eternity, when the last fatal hour was past. She had hoped
that they would have contradicted her fear of the worst, and the
certainty she had expressed of approaching death, but no one said a
word.

They continued to sit in silence together, for there was little more to
say. After a long pause, Lenz said to his uncle that the past was now
all smooth and clear, but he should like to know why his uncle had been
always so dry and reserved towards him.

"Because I hated him whose dressing gown I am now wearing. Yes! hated
him; he ill used me in my youth, and it was his fault that I was called
the 'Goatherd' for life. In his file there is a hollow produced by long
pressure; how much more must it work on the human heart!--and his
pressure on it was hard indeed. My only brother cast me off; and when
at last I came home, I rejoiced at the thought of giving vent to the
mass of hatred I had borne about with me so long. I can, with truth,
say that I hated him to the death. Why did he die, and leave me alone
in the world, without our ever having exchanged one kind word at the
last? On the whole of my long journey home, I felt so happy in the
thought that I should again have a brother; and now he was gone and no
one to replace him; but in truth, and to speak honestly, I did not
really hate him, for had I done so, would I have come home? In
this world I shall hear my brother's words no more, soon perhaps
elsewhere,----"

"Uncle," said Annele, "at the same moment when Bueble scratched at the
door--at that very same time--Lenz was telling me, that when his father
was once snowed up here, though not buried like us, he had said--'If I
must die now, I have not an enemy in the world but my brother Peter,
and I should like to be reconciled to him.'"

"Really! really!" said Petrowitsch, pressing one hand on his eyes, and
with the other grasping the well worn file of his brother.

For long nothing was heard but the ticking of the clocks, till Lenz
again asked why his uncle had always been so indifferent about him; it
had grieved his heart, that, f