There was no one else there. Through folding-doors could be heard the murmur of a patient consulting in the next room. Meuk was not usually a sick place, and nine times out of ten the doctor read his newspaper undisturbed from two to three; this was the tenth time, and though it had only just struck two a patient was with him already. Herr Dremmel and Ingeborg stared at each other for a moment without speaking. Then he said, suddenly angered by the realisation that she had come in to Meuk without asking him if she might, "You did not tell me you were coming here." "No," said Ingeborg. "Why have you come?" She sat down as inconspicuously as she could on the edge of a chair in a corner and clung to her umbrella. It was the awkwardest thing meeting Robert there. "I--I just thought I would," she murmured. "You do not look ill. You were not ill this morning." "It's--psychological," murmured Ingeborg unnerved, and laying hold of the first word that darted into her undisciplined brain. "Psycho--?" "Are _you_ ill, Robert?" she asked, suddenly anxious. "Why have _you_ come?" "My dear wife, that is my affair," said Herr Dremmel, who was particularly annoyed and puzzled by her presence. "Oh," murmured Ingeborg. She had never yet heard herself called his dear wife, and felt the immensity of her relegation to her proper place. He fluttered the pages of the _Fliegende Blätter_; she held on tighter to what seemed to be her only friend, her umbrella. "Did you walk?" he asked presently, letting off the question at her like a gun. "Yes--oh, yes," said Ingeborg, with hasty meekness. What had she come for? thought Herr Dremmel, fluttering the pages faster. Ridiculous to pretend she needed a doctor. She looked, sitting there with her unusual pink cheeks, like a flourishing sixteen--at most eighteen. What had he come for? thought Ingeborg, wishing life would not deal so upsettingly in coincidences, and keeping her eyes carefully on the carpet. Then a swift fear jumped at her heart--suppose he were ill? Suppose he had begun to have one of those large, determined, obscure diseases that seem to mow down men and make the world so much a place of widows? She had observed that for one widower in Kökensee and the surrounding district there were ten widows. The women appeared to ail through life, constantly being smitten down by one thing after the other, but at least they stayed alive; while the men, who went year by year out robustly to work, died after a single smiting. "Perhaps it's want of practice in being smitten," she thought; and looked anxiously under her eyelashes at Robert, struggling with a desire to go over and implore him to tell her what was the matter. In another moment she would have gone, driven across by her impulses, if the folding-doors had not been thrown open and the doctor appeared bowing.