The Baroness turned a cold eye on her. "Because, Frau Pastor," she said, "she was his sinning wife." "Oh," said Ingeborg; and added an inquiry, in a nervous desire to make for a brief space agreeable small talk before going away again, whether in Germany they always shot each other when they sinned. "Not each other," said the Baroness severely. "At least, not if it is a husband and his wife. He alone shoots." "Oh," said Ingeborg, considering this. She was sitting inertly on her chair, holding her cup of coffee slanting, too much dejected to drink it. "And then does that make her love him again?" she asked, in her small tired voice. The Baroness did not answer. "Only blood," said Hildebrand, "can wipe out a husband's dishonour." "How _nasty_!" said Ingeborg dejectedly. Life seemed all blood. She drooped over her cup, thinking of the cruelty with which things were apparently packed. The Baroness and Hildebrand, after a pregnant silence, turned from her and began to talk of somebody they called poor Emmi. Ingeborg sat alone with her cup, wondering how she could get away before she began to cry. Dreadful how easily she cried now. She must buy some more handkerchiefs. They seemed lately to be always at the wash. She roused herself again. She really must say something. As her way was when confused and unnerved, she caught at the first thing she found tumbling about in her mind. "Why was Emmi poor?" she asked in her small tired voice. There was another pregnant silence. To shorten it Ingeborg asked whether Emmi was the wife who had been shot--"The sinning one," she explained as nobody answered. The silence became awful. She looked up, startled by it. From the expression on their faces and the general feel of things she thought that perhaps they wouldn't mind if she went home now. She got up, dropping the spoon out of her saucer. "I--think I must be going," she said. "It's a long way home." "It seems hardly worth while to have come," said the Baroness with extraordinary chill. To which Ingeborg, absorbed in the failure of her effort to find help and comfort, answered droopingly "No." Outside the sun had just dropped behind the forest line, and she would have to walk fast if she wanted to be home before dark. The mist was already rising over the meadows beyond the trees of the garden and beginning to mix with the rose and lilac of the sky. The sandy avenue she had come along on that hot July day when first she discovered Glambeck lay at her feet in the still beauty of the last of its dresses for the year, very delicate, very transparent already, the leaves of the beeches almost all on the ground, making of the road a ribbon of light. A November smell of dampness and of peat smoke from cottage chimneys filled the air. There was a brooding peace over the world, as though in every house, in every family, brotherly love must needs in such gentleness continue.