She had taken hold of his shoulders, but he wriggled away from under her touch. "Oh, why are you so funny? No-nobody. But I should like to know it. I tell you, I should like to know it. It worries me so. I don't know why it worries me, that's all." It worried him--already? So early? Oh, then it was a suspicion, a suspicion--who knew from whence it came? He suspected what had happened in his earliest childhood unconsciously. What would happen? "O God, help me!" she cried to herself. The point now was to invent something, make something up, devise something. Those torturing questions must never, never be asked again. And she forced herself to smile, and when she felt that her smile was no smile, she stepped behind his chair and laid her cheek on the top of his head and both her hands round his neck. He could not look round at her in that way. And she spoke in the low voice in which fairy tales are told to children. "Father and I had been married a long time--just think, almost fifteen years!--and father and I wanted so much to have a dear boy or a dear little girl, so that we should not be so much alone. One day I was very sad, for all the other women had a dear child, and I was the only one who had not, and I walked about outside and cried, and then I suddenly heard a voice it came from heaven--no, a voice--a voice that--and--and----" She got bewildered, stammered and hesitated: what was she to say now? "Hm," he said impatiently. "And--? Tell me some more. And--?" "And next day you were lying in our cradle," she concluded hastily and awkwardly, in an almost stifled voice. "And"--he had pushed her hands away, and had turned round and was looking into her face now--"that's all?" "Well--and we--we were very happy." "How stupid!" he said, offended. "That's not 'being born.' Frau Laemke told it quite differently. You don't know anything about it." He looked at her doubtfully. She evaded his glance, but he kept his eyes fixed on hers. It seemed to her as if those scrutinising eyes were looking right down into her soul. She stood there like a liar, and did not know what more to say. "You don't know anything about it," he repeated once more, bitterly disappointed. "Good night." And he slouched to the door. She let him go, she did not call him back to give her his good-night kiss. She remained sitting without moving. She heard his steps in the room above. Now he opened the door to throw his boots into the corner outside, now she heard them fall--now everything was quiet. Oh, what was she to say to him later on when he asked her questions with full knowledge, a man justified in asking questions and demanding an answer to them? She let herself fall into the chair on which he had been sitting, and rested her head in her hands. CHAPTER IX