Her voice cut him to the heart. He had never heard her beg like that before, but he made a stand against the feeling of yielding that was creeping over him. Only no sentimentality. It was better to go away from there quickly, much better for her. "We're going away to-morrow." And as she looked at him with wide-open horror-struck eyes and pallid cheeks, the words escaped from his lips although he had not intended saying them, drawn from him by a bitterness that he could not master any longer: "They are not yours!" CHAPTER II And they went away. But it seemed to the woman as though every joy had disappeared with the emerald green meadow in the Alps, in which she had painted the lovely children. There was the same old nervous twitch in her face, the corners of her mouth drooped slightly and she cried very easily. Paul Schlieben watched his wife with positive dismay. Oh dear, had it all been in vain, the giving up of his work, all this travelling about without making any plans that was so fatiguing? Had the old melancholy frame of mind taken possession of her again? When he saw her sitting there so disinclined to exert herself, her hands lying idle in her lap, a feeling akin to fury came over him. Why did she not do something? Why did she not paint? That confounded meadow in the Alps was surely not the only place where she could work. Was it not beautiful here as well? They had settled down in the Black Forest. But it was in vain that he hoped from day to day that one of the quiet green wooded valleys or one of the nut-brown maidens of the Black Forest with her cherry-red hat and enormous red umbrella, as Vautier has painted them, would tempt her to bring out her painting materials. She felt no inclination--nay, she had positively a kind of dread of touching her brushes again.