He rose from the table full of suppressed wrath, and dragged his feet up the stairs to his room. He found the pictures of the saints that had been stuck into his drawer at once--"With love from Cilia"--and then he gave way to his fury and his grief. He stamped with his feet and kissed the gaudy pictures, and his tears made lots of dark spots on them. Then he rushed downstairs into the dining-room, where his father was still sitting at the table and his mother packing cakes and fruit into her small bag. Oh, she had wanted to go for a walk with him. That would be the very last thing he would do. "Where has Cilia gone? Why haven't you let her say good-bye to me?" His mother gazed at him, petrified; how did the boy guess her innermost thoughts? She could not utter a word. But he did not let her speak either, his boy's voice, which was still high, cracked and then became deep and hoarse: "Yes, you--oh, I know it quite well--you did not want her to say good-bye to me. You've sent her away so that I should not see her any more--yes, you! That's horrid of you! That's--that's vile!" He went towards her. She shrank back slowly--he raised his hands--was he going to strike her? "You rascal!" His father's hand seized him by the scruff of his neck. "How dare you? Raise your hand against your mother?" The angry man shook the boy until his teeth chattered, and did so again and again. "You--you rascal, you good-for-nothing!" "She didn't let her say good-bye to me," the boy screamed as an answer. "She's sent her away because--because----" "You still dare to speak to----" "Yes! Why didn't she let Cilia say good-bye to me? She never did anything to her. I loved her and it was for that, only for that----" "Silence!" He gave the boy a violent blow on the mouth. The man no longer recognised himself; his calmness had abandoned him, the boy's obstinacy made him lose his temper. How he struggled against the hand that was holding him, how he stared at him with his bold eyes. How dared he shout at him like that? "You"--he shook him--"so you are so insolent? So ungrateful? What would have become of you? You would have died in misery--yes--it's she who has made something out of you--who picked you up out of----" "Paul!" His wife's scream interrupted the man. Kate seized hold of his arm as though she were out of her mind: "No, no, leave him. You are not to--no!" She held her hand in front of his mouth. And when he pushed her away angrily and seized hold of the boy more firmly, she tore him away from him and pressed his head against her dress as if to protect him. She held her hand before his ears. Her face was deathly white, and, turning her dilated eyes to her husband, she implored him full of terror: "Not a word! I beseech you, I beseech you!"