When they began to speak again, it was of the unusually bad times. It seemed as if there were to be no end to them. Investments were yielding no interest, the shipping trade was in a bad way, there were no new undertakings, money was not forthcoming. Whilst they were talking, Uncle Klaus looked several times at Jörgen as if he would put more questions but for his presence. Mary understood, and made a sign to Jörgen, who rose and asked permission to go, as he had an appointment with some friends in town. It was, thus, tacitly agreed upon between Mary and him that she should have a private interview with Uncle Klaus. But what was it Uncle Klaus wished to speak to her about? She was most curious. As soon as the door closed behind Jörgen, the old man, with an anxious look, began: "Is it true, my poor child, that your father has had great losses in America?" "He has lost everything," Mary replied. Klaus jumped up, pale with the shock. "Lost everything?" He stared at her, open-mouthed and turning purple. Then exclaiming: "Good Lord! This is a simple enough explanation of the shock!" began to march up and down the room as if no one else were present. The wide trousers twisted themselves round his legs; he waved his long arms. "He has always been a confiding simpleton! an absolute fool! Fancy having a fortune like that invested in another man's business and never looking after it! What a damned--" Here he stopped suddenly and asked in astonishment: "What do you mean to marry upon--?" Mary had felt herself mortally insulted long before this question came. To behave thus in her presence--to speak thus of her father in her hearing! Nevertheless she answered archly and with her sweetest smile: "On our expectations from you, Uncle Klaus!" Klaus's astonishment was beyond all measure. She tried to moderate it before it found vent; she joked--said in English that she felt dreadfully sorry for him, as she knew what a poor man he was! But he paid no more attention to her than a bear to the twitter of birds. Out it came at last. "It is like that scoundrel Jörgen to speculate upon me!" Marching up and down again, faster than before, he continued: "Ha, ha! I might have known it! Whenever anything goes wrong, it is I who must come to the rescue--and at this moment, too, when I am hardly earning my bread! I never knew anything so impudent in my life!" He did not see her, he did not see anything. The rich man was accustomed to give free vent to his petulance, anger, insolence. "Jörgen deserves--confound him!--that I should stop the allowance I give him! He does nothing but ask for more. And now I am to----ha, ha! It's just like him!" Mary listened, pale as death. Never before had she been so humiliated; never had any human being treated her otherwise than with the deference paid to a privileged person. But she did not lose her head. "I keep Father's accounts now," she said coldly; "and I see from them that there is money of his in your hands."