"How kind every one is!" she thought, smiling at Klara, wondering if she would mind very much if she kissed her, her heart one single all-embracing Thank you that reached right round the world. And then suddenly, just as Karl was ready and the carriage was actually at the door and the little trunk being put into it, and her umbrella and sandwiches and flowers, she ran back into the house and scribbled a note to Robert and put it on the table in his laboratory where he would not be able to avoid seeing it when he came in that afternoon. "I _can't_ not tell him," was the thought that had winged her impulse, "I _can't_ not tell the truth this heavenly, God-given day of joy." "_It wasn't true about the boots_," she wrote, inking her gloves, too frantically hurried to take them off. "_I'm going to Italy with Mr. Ingram--to Venice--it's his picture--and of course other things, too on the way--if you think it over you won't really mind--I must run or I'll miss the train--_ "INGEBORG." And she climbed up into the carriage and drove off greatly relieved and strong in her faith, if you gave him time and quiet, in Robert's understanding of a thing so transparently reasonable. She would write again, she said to herself, a real letter from Berlin and put her points of view and Ingram's before him. Of course that was the right thing to do. Of course a highly intelligent man like Robert was bound ultimately to understand. But her train did not get to Berlin till eleven o'clock that night, and when she reached the _Christliche Hospiz_ she found a letter from Ingram telling her she must be at the Anhalter station next morning at nine, and though she meant to get up early and write she spent the time, being very tired, asleep instead, and it was only when the strains of a harmonium penetrated into her room and wandered round her head making slow Lutheran noises that she woke up and realised how nearly she was on the verge of missing the train to Italy. Breakfastless and prayerless and almost without paying her bill she hurried forth from the _Christliche Hospiz_, her clothes full of an odd smell of naphthalin and the meals that had been eaten there before she arrived, the ancient meals of all the yesterdays. From the smell she concluded, cautiously and reluctantly sniffing while she put down both windows of her cab, that what they had to eat in the _Christliche Hospiz_ was the chorales of the harmonium expressed in cabbage; and whether it was the cab or whether it was her clothes she did not know, but there inside it with her still was cabbage. "It's the odour of piety," she explained hastily to Ingram when he on meeting her at the station looked at her with what she thought a severe inquiry. "It's that you're within an ace of missing the train," he said, catching hold of her elbow and hurrying her down the platform to a door that still stood open, with an angry official, glaring dreadfully in spite of his tip, waiting beside it to shut it.