Ah, now he was to have a whipping. Wolfgang wiped his tears away hastily, gnashed his teeth and closed his lips tightly. "Well, are you soon going to do it?" The handle was shaken louder and louder. Then he went and opened it. His father stepped in. Not with the stick the boy expected to see in his hand, but with anger and grief written on his brow. "Come down at once. You have hurt your poor, good--much too good--mother very much. Come to her and ask her pardon. Show her that you are sorry; do you hear? Come." The boy did not move. He stared past his father into space with an unutterably unhappy, but at the same time obstinate expression on his face. "You are to come--don't you hear? Your mother is waiting." "I'm not coming," Wolfgang muttered; he hardly opened his lips at all. "What?" The man stared at the boy without speaking, quite dismayed at so much audacity. The boy returned his look, straight and bold. His young face was so pale that his dark eyes appeared still darker, a dense black. "Bad eyes," said the man to himself. And suddenly a suspicion took possession of him, a suspicion that was old and long forgotten, but still had slumbered in the recesses of his heart in spite of everything and had now all at once been roused again, and he seized hold of the boy, gripped hold of his chest so tightly that he made no further resistance. "Boy! Rascal! Have you no heart? She who has done so much for you, she, she is waiting for you and you, you won't come? On your knees, I say. Go on in front--ask her pardon. At once." And he seized the boy, who showed no emotion whatever, by the scruff of his neck instead of by his chest, and shoved him along in front of him down the stairs and into the room where Kate was sitting buried in her grief, her eyes red with weeping. "Here's somebody who wants to beg your pardon," said the man, pushing the boy down in front of her. Wolfgang would have liked to cry out: "No, I won't beg her pardon, and especially not now"--and then all at once he felt so sorry for her. Oh, she was just as unhappy as he--they did not suit each other, that was it. This knowledge came to him all at once, and it deepened his glance and sharpened the features of his young face so much that he looked old beyond his years. He jerked out with a sob: "Beg your pardon." He did not hear himself how much agony was expressed in his voice, he hardly felt either that her arms lifted him up, that he lay on her breast for some moments and she stroked his hair away from his burning brow. It was as if he were half unconscious; he only felt a great emptiness and a vague misery.