A little later his sister came down with a light in her hand to make ready the house ere morning should break.

She stole up to him and laid her hand on his shoulder timidly.

“Dear August, you must be frozen.  August, do look up! do speak!”

August raised his eyes with a wild, feverish, sullen look in them that she had never seen there.  His face was ashen white:  his lips were like fire.  He had not slept all night; but his passionate sobs had given way to delirious waking dreams and numb senseless trances, which had alternated one on another all through the freezing, lonely, horrible hours.

“It will never be warm again,” he muttered, “never again!”

Dorothea clasped him with trembling hands.

“August! do you not know me!” she cried, in an agony.  “I am Dorothea.  Wake up, dear—­wake up!  It is morning, only so dark!”

August shuddered all over.

“The morning!” he echoed.

He slowly rose up on to his feet.

“I will go to grandfather,” he said, very low.  “He is always good:  perhaps he could save it.”

Loud blows with the heavy iron knocker of the house-door drowned his words.  A strange voice called aloud through the keyhole: 

“Let me in!  Quick!—­there is no time to lose!  More snow like this, and the roads will be all blocked.  Let me in.  Do you hear?  I am come to take the great stove.”

August sprang erect, his fists doubled, his eyes blazing.

“You shall never touch it!” he screamed; “you shall never touch it!”

“Who shall prevent us?” laughed a big man, who was a Bavarian, amused at the fierce little figure fronting him.

“I!” said August “You shall never have it! you shall kill me first!”

“Strehla,” said the big man, as August’s father entered the room, “you have got a little mad dog here:  muzzle him.”

One way and another they did muzzle him.  He fought like a little demon, and hit out right and left, and one of his blows gave the Bavarian a black eye.  But he was soon mastered by four grown men, and his father flung him with no light hand out from the door of the back entrance, and the buyers of the stately and beautiful stove set to work to pack it heedfully and carry it away.

When Dorothea stole out to look for August, he was nowhere in sight.  She went back to little ’Gilda, who was ailing, and sobbed over the child, whilst the others stood looking on, dimly understanding that with Hirschvogel was going all the warmth of their bodies, all the light of their hearth.

Even their father now was very sorry and ashamed; but two hundred florins seemed a big sum to him, and, after all, he thought the children could warm themselves quite as well at the black iron stove in the kitchen.  Besides, whether he regretted it now or not, the work of the Nuernberg potter was sold irrevocably, and he had to stand still and see the men from Munich wrap it in manifold wrappings and bear it out into the snowy air to where an ox-cart stood in waiting for it.