She took the children for outings in the forest, and while they did not chatter merrily together and did not play at games she thought over all the ways that were really tactful of luring him to reasonable discussion. She knew she had made a lamentable first appearance in the _rôle_ of a retiring mother, but how difficult it was when you felt overwhelmingly to talk objectively. And then there were tears. A woman cried, and what a handicap that was. Before the first semicolon in any vital discourse with one's husband was reached one was dissolved in tears, thought Ingeborg, ashamed and resentful; and Robert grew so calm and patient, so disconcertingly calm and patient when faced by crying; he sat there like some large god, untouched by human distress, waiting for the return of reason. It is true he cried, too, sometimes, but only about odd things like Christmas Eves and sons if they were sufficiently new born--things that came under the category surely of cheerful, at most of cheerfully touching; but he never cried about these great important issues, these questions on which all one's happiness hung. Life would run more easily, she thought, if husbands and wives had the same taste in tears. Four days after her return home she asked him to forgive her. It was at the end of supper, and he had just removed his book from the supporting loaf and was getting up to go when she ran across to him with the quickness of despair and laid hold of him by both his sleeves and said, "Forgive me." He looked down at her with a gleam in his eye; he would not have to go to Meuk after all. "Do," she begged. "Robert! Do! You know I love you. I'm so miserable to have hurt you. Do let's be friends. Won't we?" "Friends?" echoed Herr Dremmel, drawing back. "Is that all you have to say to me?" "Oh, do be friends! I can't bear this." "Ingeborg," he said with the severity of disappointment, pulling his sleeves out of her hands and going to the door, "have you then not yet discovered that a true husband and wife can never be friends?" "Oh, but how dreadful!" said Ingeborg, dropping her hands by her side and staring after him as he went out. Toward the end of the week, when her unassisted meditations continued to produce no suggestions of any use for removing the stain that undoubtedly rested on her, she thought she would go in to Meuk and seek the counsel of the doctor. He had always been good to her, kind and understanding. She would go to him more in the spirit of one who goes to a priest than to a doctor, and inquire of him earnestly what she should do to be saved.