"He have sleep long enough. I call him," said Fico, tapping lightly on
the door of the lumber room that served Von Barwig as a bedroom.
Receiving no reply, Fico knocked louder. Finally he pushed open the
door. It had no lock on it and the catch was broken. Fico looked into
the room, shook his head and then turned and stared at his friends.
"He have gone up," he said with an anxious look. "You mean he have get
up," suggested Pinac. "Got up!" corrected Jenny. "Yes," replied Fico.
"He is got up and out."

Poons, who had not quite followed the intricacies of the conversation,
went into Von Barwig's room and satisfied himself that his beloved
friend was not there. The three men stared at each other. They said
nothing, but the expression on their faces denoted anxiety. "Where has
he gone?" seemed to be the question each asked silently of the other.

Von Barwig had been very quiet in the past year, so quiet that his
actions seemed to his friends to be almost mysterious. Not that he was
more reserved than usual, but there was a calmness, a resignation to
existing conditions, a listlessness that seemed to them to amount to
almost a lack of interest in life, and this mental attitude on Von
Barwig's part caused them no little anxiety.

"It's such an awful day," said Pinac as he looked out of the window.

"By God, yes!" assented Fico. "Another bliz."

The wind was howling up and down the streets and flurries of snow were
being driven against the windows, banging the shutters to and fro as
the great gusts of wind caught them in their grasp. The iron catch
that held the shutter had long since been torn out by the winter
blizzards, and the constant banging sound grated harshly on the
sensitive ears of the musicians. Poons suffered more than the rest,
and swore roundly in German every time the shutter struck against the
window jamb.

"Jenny," came the shrill voice of Miss Husted up the stairway at the
back of the hall. That lady was more than ever set against her niece's
"taking up with a musician," as she called the love match between Poons
and Jenny. Whenever Miss Husted missed Jenny on the floors below she
invariably found her upstairs talking to young August.

"We were looking for the professor," said Jenny, as her aunt's head
came up into view from the staircase below.

"Looking for the professor! Why, where is he?" asked Miss Husted.
"Surely he hasn't gone out on a day like this! Why, it's not fit for a