Frau Dremmel arrived in a black bonnet with a mauve flower in its front to mark that ten years had been at work upon the mitigation of her grief. Her son came out of his laboratory when he heard the crashes of the carriage among the stones and holes of the village street, and he was ready at the door to help her down. He was altogether silent, for he had been torn from the middle of counting and weighing the grains in samples of differently treated rye, and would have to begin the last saucerful all over again. Beside this brevity Ingeborg, in a white frock and wearing the buckled shoes of youth, with the sun shining on her freckled fairness and bare neck and her mouth framed into welcoming smiles, looked like a child. She certainly did not look like anybody's wife; and the last thing in the world that she at all resembled was the wife of a German pastor. Again Frau Dremmel, as she had done that day at Meuk, turned her eyes slowly all over her while she was receiving her son's abstracted kiss; but she said nothing except, to her son, _Guten Tag_, and passively submitted to Ingeborg's shaking both her hands, which were clothed in the black cotton of decent widowhood. "Do say something, Robert," murmured Ingeborg. "Say how glad I am. Say all the things I'd say if I could say things." Herr Dremmel gazed at his wife a moment collecting his thoughts. "Why should one say anything?" he said. "She is a simple woman. No longer young. My wife," he said to his mother, "desires me to welcome you on her behalf." "_Ach_," said Frau Dremmel. Ingeborg began to usher her along the passage towards the back door and the garden. Frau Dremmel, however, turned aside half-way down it into the living-room. "Oh, not in there!" cried Ingeborg. "We're going to have tea in the garden. Robert, please tell her--" But looking round for help she found Robert had gone, and there was the sound of a key being turned in a lock. Frau Dremmel continued to enter the living-room. Before she could be stopped she had arranged herself firmly on its sofa. "But tea," said Ingeborg, following her and gesticulating, "tea, you know. Out there--in the garden--" She pointed to the door, and she pointed to the window. Frau Dremmel slowly took off her gloves and rolled them together, and undid her bonnet strings and looked at the door and at the window and back again at her daughter-in-law, but did not move. Then Ingeborg, making a great effort at gay cordiality and determined that when words failed affectionate actions should fill up the gaps, bent over the figure on the sofa and took its arm. "Won't you come?" she said, adding a sentence she had taken special pains to get by heart, "_liebe Schwiegermutter_?" And smilingly, but yet, when it came to touching her, rather gingerly, and certainly with her heart in her mouth, she gently pulled at her sleeve. Frau Dremmel stared up at her without moving.