"Your son is with the Lord." Adler's head dropped. "How greedy he is, this Lord!" "Do not blaspheme. The time will come when you will meet Him." "When?" "When your hour strikes." The old man looked thoughtful. Then he took his watch from his pocket, wound it up, listened to the ticking and said: "My hour has struck already.... Now you go home, Martin; your wife and daughter and your church are waiting for you. Go and enjoy yourself, look after your services, drink your hock, and leave me alone. I am waiting for the collapse of the whole world, and I shall perish with it. I have no need of friends, and still less of a pastor. Your frightened face bores me." "Gottlieb, be calm! Pray!" "Go to the devil!" Adler jumped up, slipped through the garden gate and ran into the fields. The pastor did not know what to do. He returned to the villa, feeling that Adler ought to be watched; but the servants were afraid of their master. He sent for the old book-keeper, and told him he feared the mill-owner had gone out of his mind and run away. "Oh, that doesn't mean anything," said the book-keeper; "he will tire himself out and come back in a better frame of mind. He often does that when he is upset." The hours passed and evening came, but the old cotton-spinner did not appear. Never had there been anything like the present excitement in the factory. Gosławski's death had shaken them, brought home to them the wrongs they were suffering, and set them against their merciless employer. But now their feelings were of a different kind. The first impression that Ferdinand's sudden death made upon the mill hands was dismay and fright. They felt as if a thunderbolt had struck the factory and it were trembling in its foundations, as if the sun had stood still in the sky. Ferdinand dead? He--so young and strong, a man who had never had to work, never attended to a machine--the son of their almighty employer? Quicker than a miserable workman like Gosławski, he had perished, shot like a hare! To these poor, simple, dependent people Adler was a severe deity, and more powerful than the State. They were seized with fear. It seemed to them that this small landowner and country judge, Zapora, had committed a sacrilege in shooting Ferdinand. How dared he shoot him, before whom even the boldest of them had to give way? And a strange thing happened. These same people who had daily cursed the mill-owner and his son now cursed his destroyer. Some of them shouted that this fiend ought to be shot like a dog. But had the "fiend" suddenly appeared in their midst, they would certainly have run away.