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516 Katharina did not answer and pushed the cloth over her eyes again. Doctor Graesler turned to the father; he was a fairly small, stout man, nearly bald; he had lustreless eyes and a turned-up, grey moustache.

"It is not a cold," said Graesler. "It is scarlet fever."

"But, Doctor, there can surely be no question of that. Why, that is a children's sickness, isn't it? Her sister had it when she was five years old. She would have caught it then, wouldn't she?"

Katharina seemed to have been brought into fuller consciousness by the excessively noisy behaviour of her father. "The Doctor ought to know more about it than you, Father," she said. "But he will also surely make me well again, won't he?"

"Yes, that I will, Katharina, that I will," Graesler replied, and in that moment he loved her more than he had ever yet loved any human being. While he was making arrangements the sister appeared with her husband, who at first greeted the doctor with an amused wink, but soon escaped the gravity of the situation by withdrawing into the next room with his wife. To the parents, however, Graesler explained softly that he would in any event stay there over night, as the first night was of great significance in such cases; and if he watched at her bed-side uninterruptedly, he might perhaps be able to prevent certain dangers which, in their earliest symptoms, might escape untrained eyes.

"Well, Katharina," said her father, stepping up to her bed again, "you are certainly in luck. Not everybody has got such a doctor. But, Doctor"—he dragged Graesler along with him to the door—"this much I want to tell you right away: we are not rich people. Even if she did live out in the country, she was there as a guest of Ludmilla’s, as you may have noticed. Except for the railroad ticket there and return; that, of course, we paid for."

His wife reproved him for talking like this, and drew him along into the living-room; she felt, perhaps, that it was time to leave Katharina alone with her doctor. Graesler bent over the patient, stroked her cheeks and her hair, kissed her on the forehead, assured her that in a few days she would be well again and that then she would have to come back to him immediately—that he could, in fact, never again let her leave him, and would take her along with him everywhere his fate might lead him—that he had felt the most powerful urge to return to her again, and that she was his darling and his beloved and his wife, and that he loved her, loved her as no