"Oh, I've brought something for you, little one!" he cried with the delight of one who recalls an important matter in time. With measured step he trotted back into the hall and brought out a flat paste-board box tied with pink ribands. He opened it very carefully and revealed a layer of chocolate-creams wrapped in tin-foil and offered one to Amanda. And this action seemed to him, obviously, to satisfy all requirements in regard to his preliminary relations to the child. Antonie felt the approach of a head-ache such as she had now and then ever since the arsenic poisoning. "You are probably hungry, dear Robert," she said. He wouldn't deny that. "If one is on one's legs from four o'clock in the morning on, you know, and has nothing in one's stomach but a couple of little sausages, you know!" He said all that with the same cheerfulness that seemed to come to him as a matter of course and yet did not succeed in wholly hiding an inner diffidence. They sat down at the table and Antonie, taking pleasure in seeing to his comfort, forgot for a moment the foolish ache that tugged at her body and at her soul. The wine made him talkative. He related everything that interested him--his professional trips across country, the confinements that sometimes came so close together that he had to spend twenty-four hours in his buggy. Then he told of the tricks by which people whose lives he had just saved sought to cheat him out of his modest fees. And he told also of the comfortable card-parties with the judge and the village priest. And how funny it was when the inn-keeper's tame starling promenaded on the cards.... Every word told of cheerful well-being and unambitious contentment. "He doesn't think of our common future," a torturing suspicion whispered to her. But he did. "I should like to have you try, first of all, Toni, to live there. It isn't easy. But we can both stand a good deal, thank God, and if we don't like it in the end, why, we can move away." And he said that so simply and sincerely that her suspicion vanished. And with this returning certitude there returned, too, the ambition which she had always nurtured for him. "How would it be if we moved to Berlin, or somewhere where there is a university?" "And maybe aim at a professorship?" he cried with cheerful irony. "No, Tonichen, all your money can't persuade me to that. I crammed enough in that damned medical school, I've got my income and that's good enough for me." A feeling of disgust came over her. She seemed to perceive the stuffy odour of unventilated rooms and of decaying water in which flowers had stood. "That is what I suffered for," involuntarily the thought came, "_that!_"