heart beat tumultuously, and she scolded herself
for allowing her thoughts to dwell on such unavailing things. She did
not change anything by it, it only made her weary and sad.

When Kate rose after such a night she felt her husband's eyes
resting on her anxiously, and her hands trembled as she coiled
up her thick hair. It was fortunate that she dropped a hair-pin, then
she could stoop quickly and withdraw her tired face with the dark lines
under the eyes from his scrutinising glance.

"I'm not at all satisfied with my wife's health again," Paul
Schlieben complained to the doctor. "She's in a terribly nervous state
again."

"Really?" Dr. Hofmann's friendly face became energetic. "I'll tell
you one thing, my dear friend, you must take vigorous measures against
it at once."

"That's no use." The man shook his head. "I know my wife. It's the
boy's doing, that confounded boy!"

And he took Wolfgang in hand. "Now listen, you must not always be
worrying your mother like that. If I notice once more that she is
grieving about you because you are naughty, you shall see what I'll do
to you."

Did he worry his mother? Wolfgang looked very blank. And surely it
was not naughty of him to want to go to the Laemkes? It worried him to
have to sit indoors, whilst the wind was whistling outside and playing
about with one's hair in such a jolly manner. And it worried him, too,
that he was not going to the Laemkes that day.

"Well then, go," said Kate. She even drove into Berlin before dinner
and bought a doll, a pretty doll with fair locks, eyes that opened and
shut, and a pink dress. "Take it to Frida for her birthday when you
go," she said in the afternoon, putting it into the boy's hands. "Stop!
Be careful!"

He had seized hold of it impetuously, he was so delighted to be able
to bring Frida something. And in a rare fit of emotion--he was no
friend of caresses--he put up his face in an outburst of gratitude and
let his mother kiss him. He did not want her kiss, but he
submitted to it, she felt that very well, but still she was glad, and
she followed him with her eyes with a smile that lighted up her whole
face.

"But you must be home again before dark," she called out to him at
the last moment. Had he heard her?

How he ran off, as light-footed as a stag. She had never seen any
child run so quickly. He threw up his straight legs that his heels
touched his thighs every time. The wind blew his broad-brimmed sailor
hat bac