It was a warm summer Sunday evening. The lofty window was open, and the lifeless, rather damp air flowed into the room. From where they sat at the table they could look between the grey gables of intervening houses at the stars and the slowly moving clouds. There was still light in Iwersen’s little flower-shop across the way. Further on in the quiet street a concertina was being played with a good many false notes, probably by the son of Dankwart the driver. But sometimes the street was noisy with a troop of sailors, singing, smoking, arm in arm, going, no doubt, from one doubtful waterside public-house to another still more doubtful one, and obviously in a jovial mood. Their rough voices and swinging tread would die off down a cross-street. The Senator laid down his newspaper, put his glasses in his waistcoat pocket, and rubbed his hand over his eyes and forehead. “Feeble--very feeble indeed, this paper,” he said. “I always think when I read it of what Grandfather used to say about a dish that had no particular taste or consistency: it tastes as if you were hanging your tongue out of the window. One, two, three, and you’ve finished with the whole stupid thing.” “You are certainly right about that, Tom,” said Frau Permaneder, letting fall her work and looking at her brother sidewise, past her glasses but not through them. “What is there in it? I’ve always said, ever since I was a mere slip of a girl, that this town paper is a wretched sheet! I read it too, of course, for want of a better one; but it isn’t so very thrilling to hear that wholesale dealer Consul So-and-so is going to celebrate his silver wedding! We ought to read other papers: the _Königsberg Gazette_, or the _Rhenish Gazette_; then we’d--” She interrupted herself. She had taken up the paper as she spoke, and let her eye run contemptuously down the columns. But her glance was arrested by a short notice of four or five lines, which she read through, clutching her eye-glasses, her mouth slowly opening. Then she uttered two shrieks, with the palms of her hands pressed against her cheeks, and her elbows held out straight. “Oh, impossible--impossible! Imagine your not seeing that at all. It is frightful! Oh, _poor_ Armgard! It had to come to her like that!” Gerda had lifted her head from her work, and Thomas, startled, looked at his sister. Much upset, Frau Permaneder read the notice aloud, in a guttural, portentous tone. It came from Rostock, and it said that, the night before, Herr Ralf von Maiboom, owner of the Pöppenrade estate, had committed suicide by shooting himself with a revolver, in the study of the manor-house. “Pecuniary difficulties seem to have been the cause of the act. Herr von Maiboom leaves a wife and three children.” She finished and let the paper fall in her lap, then leaned back and looked at her brother and sister with wide, piteous eyes.