"You wish to get your Christmas presents, I suppose, Regina?" he inquired, smiling bitterly.
"Oh no, _Herr_," she replied. "That has never been the custom here. Besides, now I should take no pleasure in such things."
She hesitated, and then said in some embarrassment, "Let me go, _Herr_."
"I have a great deal to ask you yet, Regina."
"Good-night." Then he called her back. "Tell me first, what did that sob mean just now."
A ray of half-ashamed happiness shone in the eyes that were swollen from weeping.
"I had been so anxious about you. I thought perhaps you weren't coming back, and then when you did----" She turned and fled through the door. Her footsteps died away in the night....
The following morning Boleslav was awakened by a great rushing and roaring that had for some time mingled with his dreams. A terrific storm was raging. The topmost branches of the poplars lashed each other in fury. Huge white clouds were swept along the ground, but the air was clear. Another fall of snow seemed improbable. To-day he could not rest in the desolate, cold little house, and went out to wrestle with the elements.
"She will have a bad time of it," he thought, as the north wind hurled in his face a shower of fine icicles that pricked like needles and almost took his breath away. In the wood it was more sheltered. There the tempest crashed and crunched in the tops of the trees, seeming to vent all its fury on them. He walked on, not knowing where he was going, and then found himself on the road to Bockeldorf.
"It looks as if I were running after her," he murmured, chiding himself; and he struck into the pathless thicket.
He thought how remarkable it was that this degraded being should creep so much into his thoughts. Of course it was because he had been thrown with her day after day, and depended upon her entirely for human society. Yet he was alarmed, for he realised now, perhaps more than he had ever done before, how he felt himself every day more drawn towards her, and how much there was in her that began to appear comprehensible, excusable, and even noble, that once had only seemed to testify to her innate coarseness, and repelled him from her in disgust.
But without a doubt contact with her was doing him no good. She was drawing him down into the slough of her own worthless existence.