It
was the door which had opened and let in the cold; it was their father
who had come home.
The younger children ran joyous to meet him. Dorothea pushed the one
wooden arm-chair of the room to the stove, and August flew to set the
jug of beer on a little round table, and fill a long clay pipe; for
their father was good to them all, and seldom raised his voice in
anger, and they had been trained by the mother they had loved to
dutifulness and obedience and a watchful affection.
To-night Karl Strehla responded very wearily to the young ones'
welcome, and came to the wooden chair with a tired step and sat down
heavily, not noticing either pipe or beer.
"Are you not well, dear father?" his daughter asked him.
"I am well enough," he answered, dully and sat there with his head
bent, letting the lighted pipe grow cold.
He was a fair, tall man, gray before his time, and bowed with labour.
"Take the children to bed," he said, suddenly, at last, and Dorothea
obeyed. August stayed behind, curled before the stove; at nine years
old, and when one earns money in the summer from the farmers, one is
not altogether a child any more, at least in one's own estimation.
August did not heed his father's silence: he was used to it. Karl
Strehla was a man of few words, and, being of weakly health, was
usually too tired at the end of the day to do more than drink his beer
and sleep. August lay on the wolfskin dreamy and comfortable, looking
up through his drooping eyelids at the golden coronets on the crest of
the great stove, and wondering for the millionth time whom it had been
made for, and what grand places and scenes it had known.
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