s bond wanting that binds a real mother so indissolubly
and mysteriously, so intimately to her real child?

"Woelfchen," she said in a soft tremulous voice, "my dear
Woelfchen," and she stroked his hot forehead with her icy cold hand.
"You don't mean what you are saying. We love each other so much, don't
we? My child--my darling child, tell me."

She sought his glance, she hung on his answer.

But the answer she longed for did not come. He looked past her. "You
see, you won't tell me anything."

He seemed to harp on that. This burning desire had taken possession
of him all at once. Somebody had instilled it into him, there could be
no other explanation for it. "Who--" she asked hesitatingly--"who has
told you--you should question me in this manner? Who?"

She had taken hold of his shoulders, but he wriggled away from under
her touch. "Oh, why are you so funny? No-nobody. But I should like to
know it. I tell you, I should like to know it. It worries me so. I
don't know why it worries me, that's all."

It worried him--already? So early? Oh, then it was a suspicion, a
suspicion--who knew from whence it came? He suspected what had happened
in his earliest childhood unconsciously. What would happen? "O God,
help me!" she cried to herself. The point now was to invent something,
make something up, devise something. Those torturing questions must
never, never be asked again.

And she forced herself to smile, and when she felt that her smile
was no smile, she stepped behind his chair and laid her cheek on the
top of his head and both her hands round his neck. He could not look
round at her in that way. And she spoke in the low voice in which fairy
tales are told to children.

"Father and I had been married a long time--just think, almost
fifteen years!--and father and I wanted so much to have a dear boy or a
dear little girl, so that we should not be so much alone. One day I was
very sad, for all the other women had a dear child, and I was
the only one who had not, and I walked about outside and cried, and
then I suddenly heard a voice it came from heaven--no, a voice--a voice
that--and--and----" She got bewildered, stammered and hesitated: what
was she to say now?

"Hm," he said impatiently. "And--? Tell me some more. And--?"

"And next day you were lying in our cradle," she concluded hastily
and awkwardly, in an almost stifled voice.

"And"--he had pushed her hands away, and had turned round and was
looking into