Robert, however, would not be fetched. He looked up at her with a great reproach on her entrance, for as invariably happened on the rare occasions when the tremendousness of what she had to say seemed to her to justify interrupting, he thought he had just arrived within reach, after an infinite patient stalking, of the coy, illusive heart of the problem. "Mr. Ingram's here," she said breathlessly. He gazed at her over his spectacles. "In the parlour," said Ingeborg. "He's come to tea. Isn't it wonderful? He's going to paint--" "Who is here, Ingeborg?" "Mr. Ingram. Edward Ingram. Come and talk to him while I get tea." She had even forgotten to shut the door in her excitement, and a puff of wind from the open window picked up Herr Dremmel's papers and blew them into confusion. He endeavoured to catch them, and requested her in a tone of controlled irritation to shut the door. "Oh, how dreadful of me!" she said, hastily doing it, but with gaiety. "I do not know," then said Herr Dremmel, mastering his annoyance, "Mr. Ingram." "Rut, Robert, it's _the_ Mr. Ingram. Edward Ingram. The greatest artist there is now. The great portrait painter. Berlin has--" "Is he a connection of your family's, Ingeborg?" "No, but he painted Ju--" "Then it is not necessary for me to interrupt my afternoon on his behalf." And Herr Dremmel bent his head over his papers again. "But, Robert, he's _great_--he's _very_ great--" Herr Dremmel, with a wetted thumb, diligently rearranged his pages. "But--why, I told him you'd love to see him. What am I to say to him if you don't come?" Herr Dremmel, his eye caught by a sentence he had written, was reading with a deep enormous appetite. "Tea," said Ingeborg desperately. "There's tea. You always _do_ come to tea. It'll be ready in a minute." He looked up at her, gathering her into his consciousness again. "Tea?" he said. But even as he said it his thoughts fell off to his problem, and without removing his eyes from hers he began carefully to consider a new aspect of it that in that instant had occurred to him. There was nothing for it but to go away. So she went. CHAPTER XXVIII Ingram's visit to the Glambecks, had in any case been coming to an end the next day, when he was to have gone to Königsberg on his way to the Caucasus, a place he hoped might trick him by its novelty for at least a time out of boredom, and the Baron and Baroness were greatly surprised when he told them he was not going to the Caucasus but to Kökensee instead. With one voice they exclaimed, "Kökensee?" "To paint the pastor's wife's hair," said Ingram.