Accompanied by Stubbe, Wilhelm mounted the worn wooden staircase leading to the second floor.  The flat consisted of a kitchen and a room with one window.  Even when the sun was most lavish of his rays, it was none too light there; now, in the early-falling dusk of a dull late autumn day, Wilhelm found himself in a dim half-light as he opened the door.  There was no fire in the stove, no lamp upon the table.  In the cold and darkness he could just distinguish among the sparse furniture a slim, wretched-looking woman sitting on a chair by the table, nursing a baby wrapped in an old blanket; a tall, large-boned man in workman’s clothes, with a bushy beard and gloomy eyes, leaning against the wall beside the window, and some fair-haired children, unnaturally silent and motionless for their age, crouching side by side on the bed, only swinging their legs a little from time to time.

At Wilhelm’s entrance with a friendly “Good-evening,” the woman rose from her seat and gazed at the intruder with hostile eyes, the children ceased swinging their legs, and the workman shrank away from the window into the deeper shadow of the corner.

“The landlord,” Stubbe announced solemnly.

Frau Wander threw up her head.  “Now then, what do you want now?” she said hurriedly, her bitter tone beginning on the ordinary pitch, but rising rapidly to a shrewish scream.  “It’s the rent, I suppose; and I suppose we’re to have notice to quit?  It’s all one to me.  I’ve got no money and so I tell you; but what’s here you can keep, and you can have the skin off my back too, and I’ll throw in the children beside.  They can drag a milk-cart as well as dogs.  Why don’t you cut my throat at once and have done with it?”

“But, my good woman,” cried Stubbe, horror-stricken, “what are you thinking of?  The Herr Doctor only means well by you.”

Wilhelm had come quite close to the poor thing, who had worked herself up into such a state of excitement that she was trembling from head to foot, and said in that gentle voice of his that always found its way to the heart: 

“You are worrying yourself unnecessarily, Frau Wander.  I have not come about the rent, and nobody is going to turn you out of your home.  Herr Stubbe here has been telling me about your troubles, and I came to see if we could not give you a little assistance.”

She stared at him speechless, with wide-open eyes.  The children on the bed began to whisper to one another.  Wilhelm took advantage of the pause to say a few words in Father Stubbe’s ear, whereupon the old man vanished.

“Why don’t you offer the gentleman a chair?” said the workman, coming out of his dark corner.

The woman slowly drew forward a chair, round the torn seat of which the straw stood up raggedly on all sides.  Wilhelm thanked her with a wave of the hand.

“Do not be afraid of me, dear Frau Wander,” he went on.  “Tell me something of your circumstances.”