“What do you want the pot for, Mr Meyerhofer?” asked the old woman. “I also am going to celebrate _polterabend_, Frau Jankus,” he replied, with a hollow laugh. “Perhaps they will give me some of the wedding cake.” The old woman nearly died of laughing, and his father limped off to his bedroom with the pot, locking the door carefully behind him. The whole house had retired to rest, only Paul still paced up and down in the dark yard. “So to morrow will be her wedding,” he thought, folding his hands “If I were a good Christian I ought to say a prayer for her happiness. But I am not such an inert fellow yet, by a long way I believe that I once loved her very much, more than I knew myself. How can it have been that I became a stranger to her?” He thought and thought, but could come to no right conclusion. The moon rose over the moor--a great blood red disk--which spread an uncertain light all over the yard. The storm seemed to be augmenting. It whistled round the corners and howled through the trees. “If a fire were to break out to day it would not content itself with the barn only,” thought Paul and then it occurred to him that he must send a reminder to the agent, to hasten the insurance. “For one never knows what might happen during the night. I will go to sleep”--he concluded his reflections--“to morrow is another day, and a wedding day, too.” He went on tiptoe to the bedroom, which he had prepared for himself near that of his fathers, so as to be at hand if anything should happen to the old man. He lighted no candle, for the full moon, rising higher, already shone brightly into the room. “I wonder if you will sleep to night? he thought an hour later. The shadows of the storm blown leaves led a wild dance on his counterpane, and in between the light of the moon quivered like little tongues of white flame. “On that midsummer night the moon shone just as bright,” and then he remembered how white Elsbeth’s dressing gown had looked, peeping out underneath her dark cloak. “That was the finest night of my life,” he murmured, with a sigh, and then he decided to go to sleep! and drew his blanket over his head to strengthen his resolution. Some time after, he thought he heard his father get up softly in the next room and limp out at the door. He could distinctly hear how the crutch clattered on the stone flags of the hall. “He will come back directly,” he thought, for it often happened that his father got up in the night. With that he fell into an uneasy doze, in which all sorts of terrible dreams chased each other through his head. When he next came to full consciousness the moon was already high in the heavens, her beams now scarcely illumined his room at all, but the garden and yard lay bathed in light. “Strange--it seems to me as if I had not heard father come back,” he said to himself. He sat up and looked at the watch that was hanging over his bed. “Light minutes to one.” Two hours had elapsed meanwhile.