to answer the
electric bell as if somebody were in pursuit of him.

"Dear, dear!" Frau Laemke clasped her hands. "Is the boy so bad,
really so bad?"

Cilia only nodded and hid her streaming eyes in her apron, but the
cook said dully: "It's about over."

"About over? Will he really die Wolfgang, the boy?" The woman stared
incredulously: that was impossible. But she had turned terribly
pale.

"Well, it's bad enough," said the cook. "Our doctor has called in
another professor, a very well-known one--he was here yesterday--but
they don't believe that they can do anything more. The illness has
attacked the kidneys and heart. He no longer knows anybody, you know. I
was in the room this morning, I wanted to see him once more--there he
lay quite stiff and silent, as though made of wax. I don't believe
he'll pull through." The good-natured woman wept.

They all three wept, sitting round the kitchen table. Frau Laemke
entirely forgot that she had made up her mind never to enter that
kitchen again, and that her cabbage, that she had put on for their
dinner, was probably burning. "Oh, dear, oh dear," she repeated again
and again, "how will she get over it? Such a child--and an only child,
whom she adored so."

Upstairs the doctors were standing at the sick-bed, the old family
doctor and the great authority, who was still a young man. They were
standing on the right and the left of it.

The rash had quite disappeared; there was not a trace of red on the
boy's face now, and his eyes with their extremely black lashes remained
persistently closed. His lips were blue. His broad chest, which was
quite sunken now, trembled and laboured.

At every gasping breath he took his mother gasped too. She was
sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed, stiffly erect; she had sat
like that the whole night. Her piercing eyes with their terrified
expression flew to the doctors' grave faces, and then stared past them
into space. There they stood, to the right and to the left--but there,
there!--did they not see it?--there at the head of the bed stood
Death!

She started up with an inarticulate sound, then sank down again as
though broken in spirit.

The doctors had given the child, who was so dangerously ill, an
injection; his heart was very weak, which made them fear the worst.
Then the authority took leave: "I'll come again to-morrow"--but a shrug
of the shoulders and a "Who knows?" lay in that "I'll come again
to-morrow."

The family