But it came too late; Hanchen had knocked the hat off his head and the skin off his face with her broom, and Mamsell Westphalen had thrown two hands full of ashes into his eyes. My uncle Herse now stood in the kitchen, puffing, and blowing, and snorting and groping with his hands out, as if he were playing at "blind man's buff,"--his heart full of rage, and dark night before his eyes. His whole plan had turned out a nest of addled eggs; for what is there in a secret that becomes a kitchen scene! what can an imposing face do when it is battered about by a broom! and what becomes of the splendour of a Rathsherr's uniform when peat-ashes lie on it like blight on a flower! The first who recovered her senses, and became aware who it was that they had been treating in this fashion, was Hanchen. With one bound she was out of doors in the rain. Corlin followed and said to her--"I'd rather be wet through, than get one of Mamsell Westphalen's scoldings." "By George! It's the Herr Rathsherr," cried Fritz Sahlmann. Mamsell Westphalen stood there like Lot's wife--only that she was perhaps stouter--and looked at the Rathsherr as if he were Sodom and Gomorrah. "Merciful heavens! We are all wandering in the dark," she said in a feeble voice. "It's very well for _you_ to talk of wandering in the dark," sputtered my uncle Herse. "You can see, but I can't open my eyes. Get me some water." Now began a scene of washing, and rubbing, and pitying, and wondering, and scolding, and consoling; but my uncle was still angry, and said that all the women in the Schloss might be hanged for what he cared, it would be a long time before he was caught entering into secret conspiracies with women again. Mamsell Westphalen held her apron up to her eyes and began to cry: "Herr Rathsherr," she said, "tell me what I ought to do. I have no father or mother left and, I after last night, I couldn't let myself be seen by the Herr Amtshauptmann. You are the only one I can look to for help now." My uncle Herse had a heart, a soft heart; my uncle Herse had a soul, a tender soul; and, when he had quite got the ashes out of his eyes, and Mamsell Westphalen had rubbed cold cream on the scratches in his face till it looked like a red and white toadstool, he said kindly: "Leave off crying. I will help you. You must take to flight." "Take to flight!" she exclaimed and looked in a puzzled way at her figure from head to foot; "Do you mean _me_ to take to flight?" And she thought of the pigeons up in her pigeon-house; and if the matter had not been too serious for her, she would almost have laughed. "Yes," said my uncle. "Do you think that with these roads and in this weather you could walk three or four miles at a stretch, for no conveyance is to be had--and besides it would not be secret enough?" "Herr Rathsherr," she said, and all desire to laugh entirely left her, "look at me for a moment. Is it likely I could? Why, it's hard work for me now to go upstairs."