d not been touched. The room was empty.

Then her heart grew cold with dread. So she had not slept, his
return had not escaped her. On that former occasion he had come
home--true, he was drunk, but still he had come home--but not this
time!

CHAPTER XV

"Wolfgang not here again?" said Paul Schlieben as he joined his wife in
her room. "He comes so little to the office too. They always assure me
that he has just been--but why doesn't he keep the same office-hours as
I? Where is he?" He looked inquiringly and impatiently at his wife.

She shrugged her shoulders, and the evening sun, which was casting a
last gleam through the tall window as it set, touched her cheek with
red for a moment. "I don't know," she said in a low voice. And then she
looked so lost as she gazed out into the autumn evening, that her
husband felt that her thoughts were far away, looking for something
outside.

"I've just come from town, Kate," he said somewhat annoyed, and the
vexation he felt at his son's absence gave his voice a certain
sharpness, "and I'm hungry and tired. It's already eight o'clock--we'll
have our supper. And you've not even a friendly face to show me?"

She got up quickly to ring for supper, and tried to smile. But it
was no real smile.

He saw it, and that put him still more out of humour. "Never mind,
don't try. Don't force yourself to smile." He sat down at the table
with a weary movement. But his hunger did not seem to be so great,
after all, as he only helped himself in a spiritless manner
when the steaming dishes were brought in and placed in front of him,
and ate in the same manner without knowing what he was eating.

The dining-room was much too large for the two lonely people; the
handsome room looked uncomfortably empty on that cool evening in
autumn. The woman shivered with cold.

"We shall have to start heating the house," said the man.

That was all that was said during the meal. After it was over he got
up to go across to his study. He wanted to smoke there, the room was
smaller and cosier; he did not notice that his wife's eyes had never
left him.

If Paul would only tell her what he thought of Wolfgang staying
away! Where could Wolfgang be now? She became entirely absorbed in her
wandering thoughts, and hardly noticed that she was alone in the cold
empty room.

She had a book in front of her, a book the whole world found
interesting--an acquaintance had said to her: "I could not stop readin