Part 5

“Well, you aint asking of him. I ask him. I try to git you back, once!”

“I tell you, it aint no use; I know the boss, he aint going to be letting womans talk him over; no, he's a good man, he knows how to work his business himself!”

“But would you promise me, Kurt?”

Lieders's eyes blurred with a mild and dreamy mist; he sighed softly. “Thekla, you can't see how it is. It is like you are tied up, if I don't can do that; if I can then it is always that I am free, free to go, free to stay. And for you, Thekla, it is the same.”

Thekla's mild eyes flashed. “I don't believe you would like it so you wake up in the morning and find ME hanging up in the kitchen by the clothes-line!”

Lieders had the air of one considering deeply. Then he gave Thekla one of the surprises of her life; he rose from his chair, he walked in his shuffling, unheeled slippers across the room to where the old woman sat; he put one arm on the back of the chair and stiffly bent over her and kissed her.

“Lieber Herr Je!” gasped Thekla.

“Then I shall go, too, pretty quick, that is all, mamma,” said he.

Thekla wiped her eyes. A little pause fell between them, and in it they may have both remembered vanished, half-forgotten days when life had looked differently to them, when they had never thought to sit by their own fireside and discuss suicide. The husband spoke first; with a reluctant, half-shamed smile, “Thekla, I tell you what, I make the bargain with you; you git me back that place, I don't do it again, 'less you let me; you don't git me back that place, you don't say notings to me.”

The apron dropped from the withered, brown hands to the floor. Again there was silence; but not for long; ghastly as was the alternative, the proposal offered a chance to escape from the terror that was sapping her heart.

“How long will you give me, papa?” said she.

“I give you a week,” said he.

Thekla rose and went to the door; as she opened it a fierce gust of wind slashed her like a knife, and Lieders exclaimed, fretfully, “what you opening that door for, Thekla, letting in the wind? I'm so cold, now, right by the fire, I most can't draw. We got to keep a fire in the base-burner good, all night, or the plants will freeze.”

Thekla said confusedly that something sounded like a cat crying. “And you talking like that it frightened me; maybe I was wrong to make such bargains------”

“Then don't make it,” said Lieders, curtly, “I aint asking you.”

But Thekla drew a long breath and straightened herself, saying, “Yes, I make it, papa, I make it.”

“Well, put another stick of wood in the stove, will you, now you are up?” said Lieders, shrugging his shoulders, “or I'll freeze in spite of you! It seems to me it grows colder every minute.”

But all that day he was unusually gentle with Thekla. He talked of his youth and the struggles of the early days of the firm; he related a dozen tales of young Lossing, all illustrating some admirable trait that he certainly had not praised at the time. Never had he so opened his heart in regard to his own ideals of art, his own ambitions. And Thekla listened, not always comprehending but always sympathizing; she was almost like a comrade, Kurt thought afterward.

The next morning, he was surprised to have her appear equipped for the street, although it was bitterly cold. She wore her garb of ceremony, a black alpaca gown, with a white crocheted collar neatly turned over the long black, broadcloth cloak in which she had taken pride for the last five years; and her quilted black silk bonnet was on her gray head. When she put up her foot to don her warm overshoes Kurt saw that the stout ankles were encased in white stockings. This was the last touch. “Gracious, Thekla,” cried Kurt, “are you going to market this day? It is the coldest day this winter!”

“Oh, I don't mind,” replied Thekla, nervously. Then she had wrapped a scarf about her and gone out while he was getting into his own coat, and conning a proffer to go in her stead.

“Oh, well, Thekla she aint such a fool like she looks!” he observed to the cat, “say, pussy, WAS it you out yestiddy?”

The cat only blinked her yellow eyes and purred. She knew that she had not been out, last night. Not any better than her mistress, however, who at this moment was hailing a street-car.

The street-car did not land her anywhere near a market; it whirled her past the lines of low wooden houses into the big brick shops with their arched windows and terra-cotta ornaments that showed the ambitious architecture of a growing Western town, past these into mills and factories and smoke-stained chimneys. Here, she stopped. An acquaintance would hardly have recognized her, her ruddy cheeks had grown so pale. But she trotted on to the great building on the corner from whence came a low, incessant buzz. She went into the first door and ran against Carl Olsen. “Carl, I got to see Mr. Lossing,” said she breathlessly.

“There ain't noding----”

“No, Gott sei dank', but I got to see him.”

It was not Carl's way to ask questions; he promptly showed her the office and she entered. She had not seen young Harry Lossing half a dozen times; and, now, her anxious eyes wandered from one dapper figure at the high desks, to another, until Lossing advanced to her.

He was a handsome young man, she thought, and he had kind eyes, but they hardened at her first timid sentence: “I am Mrs. Lieders, I come about my man----”

“Will you walk in here, Mrs. Lieders?” said Lossing. His voice was like the ice on the window-panes.