“Not lessen you untie all of me, I won’t touch a bite.”

“You know why I won’t untie you, papa.”

“Starving will kill as dead as hanging,” was Lieders’s orphic response to this.

Thekla sighed and went away, leaving the tray on the table.  It may be that she hoped the sight of food might stir his stomach to rebel against his dogged will; if so she was disappointed; half an hour went by during which the statue under the bedclothes remained without so much as a quiver,

Then the old woman returned.  “Aint you awful cramped and stiff, papa?”

“Yes,” said the statue.

“Will you promise not to do yourself a mischief, if I untie you?”

“No.”

Thekla groaned, while the tears started to her red eyelids.  “But you’ll git awful tired and it will hurt you if you don’t get the ropes off, soon, papa!”

“I know that!”

He closed his eyes again, to be the less hindered from dropping back into his distempered musings.  Thekla took a seat by his side and sat silent as he.  Slowly the natural pallor returned to the high forehead and sharp features.  They were delicate features and there was an air of refinement, of thought, about Lieders’s whole person, as different as possible from the robust comeliness of his wife.  With its keen sensitive-ness and its undefined melancholy it was a dreamer’s face.  One meets such faces, sometimes, in incongruous places and wonders what they mean.  In fact, Kurt Lieders, head cabinet maker in the furniture factory of Lossing & Co., was an artist.  He was, also, an incomparable artisan and the most exacting foreman in the shops.  Thirty years ago he had first taken wages from the senior Lossing.  He had watched a modest industry climb up to a great business, nor was he all at sea in his own estimate of his share in the firm’s success.  Lieders’s workmanship had an honesty, an infinite patience of detail, a daring skill of design that came to be sought and commanded its own price.  The Lossing “art furniture” did not slander the name.  No sculptor ever wrought his soul into marble with a more unflinching conscience or a purer joy in his work than this wood-carver dreaming over sideboards and bedsteads.  Unluckily, Lieders had the wrong side of the gift as well as the right; was full of whims and crotchets, and as unpracti-cal as the Christian martyrs.  He openly defied expense, and he would have no trifling with the laws of art.  To make after orders was an insult to Kurt.  He made what was best for the customer; if the latter had not the sense to see it he was a fool and a pig, and some one else should work for him, not Kurt Lieders, BEGEHR!