But she was not fainting this time. She was very much alive, for, to Franz’s great astonishment, she was busied at the packing of a valise.
“Are you going away too?” asked Franz. Mrs. Bernauer answered in a voice that was dull with weariness: “Yes, Franz, I am going away. Will you please look up the time-tables of the Southern railroad and let me know when the morning express leaves? And please order a cab in time for it. I will depend upon you to look after the house in my absence. You can imagine that it must be something very important that takes me to Venice.”
“To Venice? Why, what are you going to Venice for?”
“Never mind about that, Franz, but help me to pray that I may get there in time.”
She almost pushed the old man out of the door with these last words and shut and locked it behind him.
She wanted to be alone with this hideous fear that was clutching at her heart. For it was not to Franz that she could tell the thoughts that came to her lips now as she sank down, wringing her hands, before a picture of the Madonna: “Oh Holy Virgin, Mother of our Lord, plead for me! let me be with my dear mistress when the terrible time comes and they take her husband away from her, or, if preferring death to disgrace, he ends his life by his own hand!”
Commissioner Von Riedau sat at his desk late that evening, finishing up some important papers. The quiet of an undisturbed night watch had settled down on the busy police station. An occasional low murmur of whispering voices floated up from the guardroom below, but otherwise the stillness was broken only by the scratching of the commissioner’s pen and the rustle of the paper as he turned the leaves. It was a silence so complete that a light step on the stair outside and the gentle turning of the doorknob was heard distinctly and the commissioner looked up with almost a start to see who was coming to his room so late. Joseph Muller stood in the open door, awaiting his chief’s official recognition.
“Oh! it’s you, Muller. So late? Come in. Anything new?” asked the commissioner. “Have you succeeded in drawing a confession from that stubborn tramp yet? You’ve been interviewing him, I take it?”
“Yes, I had a long talk with Johann Knoll to-day.”
