nderstood its deeper meaning for the
first time:

Art thou now with fair cheeks prancing,
Cheeks milk-white, through rose-light glancing?
Roses wither soon, alas!

He went home at once, he had no wish to loaf about out of doors
any longer. And as he sauntered along with unsteady gait down
out-of-the-way roads, something rose up before him in the dusk of the
autumn evening and placed itself in his path--it was a question:

"And you? Where are you going?"

He entered his parents' house in a mood that was strangely soft and
conciliatory. But when he stepped into the room, his parents were
sitting there as though to pass sentence on him.

Kate had not been able to keep it to herself after all, it had
weighed on her mind, she had to tell somebody what she had seen. And it
had irritated her husband more than his wife had expected. So the boy
had got into such company!

"Where have you been wandering about?" he said to his son
angrily.

The boy stopped short: why that voice? It was not so late.
He raised his head with the feeling that they were treating him
unjustly.

"Don't look at me so impudently." His father lost control of
himself. "Where is that woman you were wandering about with?"

Wandering about--woman? The hot blood surged to the boy's head.
Frida Laemke a woman--how mad. "She isn't a woman," he flared up. And
then: "I haven't been wandering about."

"Come, come, I've----" the man broke off quickly; he could not say:
"I've seen you"--so he said: "We've seen you."

Wolfgang got very red. Oh!--they had spied on him--no doubt
to-day--had crept after him? He was not even safe from their prying
looks so far away. He was furious. "How can you say 'that woman.' She
isn't a woman."

"Well--what is she then, may I ask?"

"My friend."

"Your friend?" His father gave a short angry laugh. "Friend--very
well, but it's rather early for you to have such a friend. I forbid you
to have friends of such doubtful, such more than doubtful
character."

"She isn't doubtful." Wolfgang's eyes sparkled. How right Frau Laemke
was when she said the other day to him when he went to see them again:
"Although I'm very pleased to see you, don't come too often, Wolfgang.
Frida is only a poor girl, and such a one gets talked about at
once."

No, there was nothing doubtful about her. The son looked his father
full in the face, pale with fury. "She's as respectable a girl as any.
How can you