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Hürlin sat opposite him and threw occasional glances of suspicious observation at him. Once, when the reader could not help laughing at something amusing, the other was very much tempted to ask him what it was.
He did not, however, hasten to finish his toilette, and when the ex-manufacturer advised him to hurry, he said "Oh, you go on down I'll be after you in a minute." Hürlin did so, and Heller heaved a sigh of relief. He seized the washbasin and emptied the clean water out of the window for he had a horror of washing.
The weaver was disposed to forbid it, but finally gave in, on condition that the game should only be for love. Finkenbein burst out laughing. "Of course, Herr Sauberle. What else could it be for? I was born to millions, but they were all swallowed up in the Hürlin stock excuse me, Mr. Manufacturer!"
Heller, the sailmaker, cast sidelong and malicious glances at him, but after a time attempted to reëstablish intercourse with him. When he met the manufacturer out at their resting-place, he would occasionally put on a friendly expression and greet him with "Fine weather, Hürlin! I think we shall have a good autumn, don't you?" But Hürlin merely looked at him, nodded wearily, and made no sound.
Since Hürlin, for all his self-confidence, was not a genius and understood only the externals of his trade, he descended at first slowly and then with increasing rapidity from his height of success, and finally reached a point where he was unable to conceal from himself that he was beaten.
After the necessary preliminaries had been accomplished, Herr Hürlin developed a busy and mysterious activity and correspondence, often took little journeys, and bought a piece of ground at the bottom of the valley.
He was thus comfortable and cheerful; he began to settle down as in a warm nest, and resolved not to worry under these delightful circumstances, but to live many years for his own pleasure and the annoyance of the citizens. Now that Hürlin was gone, he was the eldest of the Sun-Brothers.
He was the son of Hürlin the locksmith in the Senfgasse, who was long since dead. He was a little more than forty, and no one knew him any longer, since he had wandered away as a very young man and had never since been seen in the town. Now, however, he wore a good, neat suit of clothes, a moustache and well-trimmed hair, a silver watch-chain, a stiff hat and a high clean collar.
"I don't have to," said Hürlin with emphatic dignity, once more egged on by a nudge from the sailmaker; "I belong here just as much as you do, and have got as good a right to talk as the next man. So now you know!" The driver, who had just paid for a round of drinks at his table and so felt entitled to take the leading position, got up and came over, tired of the altercation.
At the head sat the weaver; then on one side came the red-cheeked Holdria next to the thin, decayed and miserable-looking Hürlin. Opposite them sat the cunning sailmaker with his scanty hair, and the merry, bright-eyed Finkenbein.
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