“What have you done to your father?” his mother whimpered. She had beheld this deed of violence petrified with horror, for that her son could attack his father was to her perfectly incomprehensible. She looked shyly up at him, and repeated, wofully, “What have you done to your father?” Paul bent down to her, kissed her hand, and said, “Be calm, mother, I had to save his life.” “And now you have locked him up? Paul, Paul!” “He must remain there till Michel has gone,” he replied. “Don’t open the door for him, or there will be an accident.” Then he walked out into the yard. The servant was leaning against the stable door, chewing his black beard, and leering at him viciously. “Michel Raudszus!” he called out to him. The man approached. The veins on his forehead had swollen like blue cords. He did not dare look at him. “Your surplus wages are five marks and fifty pfennigs. Here they are. In five minutes you must be gone.” The servant gave him such a terribly sinister glance that Paul was alarmed at the thought that he had suffered this man near him so long without any foreboding; he kept his eyes fixed upon him, for he feared every moment to be attacked by him. But the servant turned away in silence, went to the stables, where he tied up his bundle, and two minutes later walked out at the gate. During the whole terrible scene he had not uttered a single word. “That’s done! now to father,” said Paul, firmly resolved to bear all blows and abuse calmly. He unlocked the door, and expected that his father would rush upon him. The old man was sitting huddled up in the corner of the sofa, staring before him. He did not move, either, when Paul came up to him and said, beseechingly, “I did not like doing it, father, but it had to be done.” He only gave him a shy look askance; then said, bitterly, “You can do what you like; I am an old man, and you are the strongest.” Then he sank back again. From that day forward Paul was master in the house. CHAPTER XIV. Three weeks had passed since then. Paul worked like a galley-slave. In spite of that a strange unrest was upon him. When he allowed himself a few moments’ repose he could not bear to stay at home. He felt as if the walls were falling in upon him. Then he rambled about on the heath or in the wood, or he lingered near Helenenthal. “If I should meet Elsbeth I think I should sink into the ground with shame,” he said to himself, and yet he looked about for her everywhere, and trembled with fear and joy when he saw a female figure coming towards him in the distance. He also began to neglect his night’s rest. As soon as all in the house were asleep he crept away, and often returned only in the bright morning to go to work again with swimming head and weary limbs.