w sunflower in his garden, so he
still delighted in it. If the perspiration stood in drops on his brown
skin, he would push his white panama hat a little further back from his
forehead, but he never drew his breath more freely, easily, and felt
less oppressed.

"It was splendid, pater," he said, and his eyes gleamed. "First of
all I swam the whole width of the lake three times, there and back and
there and back and there and back again without stopping. What do you
say to that?"

"Much too tiring, very thoughtless," remarked Paul Schlieben, not
without some anxiety. Indeed Hofmann was not at all anxious that the
boy should swim.

"Thoughtless? Fatiguing? Ha ha!" Wolfgang thought it great fun.
"That's a mere trifle to me. I've really missed my vocation, you know.
You ought not to have put me into an office. I ought to have been a
swimmer, a rider or--well, a cowboy in the Wild West."

He had said it in joke without meaning anything, but it seemed to
the man, who suddenly looked at him with eyes that had grown
suspicious, that something serious, an accusation, was concealed behind
the joke. What did he want then? Did he want to gallop through life
like an unrestrained boy?

"Well, your sporting capacities will be of use to you when you are a
soldier," he said coolly. "At present what you have to do here is of
more importance. Have you drawn up the contract for delivery for White
Brothers? Show it to me."

"Directly."

Wolfgang disappeared; but it was some time before he returned. Had
he only done the work now, which he had been told was urgent and was to
be done carefully? The ink was still quite fresh, the writing was very
careless, even if legible; it was no business hand. Schlieben frowned;
he was strangely irritable to-day. At any other time he would have been
struck by the celerity with which the boy had finished the work he had
neglected; but to-day the careless writing, the inkspots in the margin,
the slipshod manner in which it had all been done, which seemed to him
to point to a want of interest, vexed him.

"Hm!" He examined it once more critically. "When did you do
this?"

"When you gave me it to do." The tone in which Wolfgang said this
was so unabashed that it was impossible to doubt it.

The man felt quite ashamed of himself. How a seed of suspicion
grows! He had really wronged his son this time. But that question of
the money still remained, the boy had not been open and honest in that.
It se