CONTENTS
Just when Meyerhofer’s estate was to be sold by auction, his third son Paul was born.
That was a hard time indeed.
Frau Elsbeth, with her haggard face and melancholy smile, lay in her big four-post bed, with the cradle of the new-born child near her, and listened to every noise that reached her in her sad sickroom from the yard and the house.
At each suspicious sound she started up, and each time, when a strange man’s voice was heard, or a vehicle came driving along with a rolling sound, she asked, clinging with great anxiety to the bedposts:
“Has it come to the worst? Has it come to the worst?”
Nobody answered her. The doctor had given strict orders to keep every excitement from her, but little he thought, good man, that this constant suspense would torment her a thousand times more than the most terrible certainty.
One morning, the fifth day after her child’s birth, she heard her husband, whom she had scarcely seen during this trying time, pacing up and down in the next room, swearing and sighing. She could only understand one word, only one; that he repeated over and over again: the word “Homeless.”
Then she knew. It had come to the worst.
She put her feeble hand on the little head of the new