Markus runs away from Tante after her harsh discipline and finds refuge with Delphine, who protects him from being reclaimed and takes him into her household. The episode turns a boy’s flight from punishment into a new bond: Markus chooses Delphine because she cared for his mother, Eva Waldvogel, and Delphine accepts responsibility for him until his father, Fidelis Waldvogel, returns.

Causes and Flight

The events emerge first through Tante’s complaints. The next morning, she accuses Delphine of hiding Markus, while Delphine studies the familiar arrangement of Fidelis’s features in Tante’s face and keeps her attention on the woman’s expression rather than her words. Tante’s account, as Delphine gathers it, suggests that she had switched Markus and beaten him, then presents his escape as evidence of his supposed misbehavior. Delphine recognizes the lecture as an effort to discredit the boy and conceal the cause of his bruises.

Markus’s flight follows an earlier, exhausted journey to Delphine’s home. The night before Tante comes to complain, he slips out through the back door and makes his way by back roads and through cornfields, sand-picking ground, ditches, and pastures. Delphine has made extra food without knowing for certain that he is coming: she adds flour and another egg to the spaetzle, puts two more onions into the goulash, and uses all the meat. Her preparations become an unspoken welcome, anticipating the hunger and exhaustion with which Markus arrives.

Delphine Protects Him

When Tante confronts her, Delphine does not let her inside. She folds her arms in the doorway and denies having seen Markus, repeating the denial even after Tante calls her a liar. Delphine understands that Fidelis is away making deliveries in a truck packed with sausage, so Tante cannot appeal to him in person. She tells Tante that the boy is no fool and will find somewhere to hide until his father returns, presenting his disappearance as temporary while withholding the fact that he is already sheltered inside.

The lie is made practical by Delphine’s control of the house and the timing of Tante’s departure. After Tante drives away, Delphine calls toward the bedroom door, and Markus comes out and runs to the window to ask whether she will return. Delphine doubts it. Tante has left without seeing him, while Markus has been hidden in the very home where she came looking.

Delphine also redirects Tante’s insinuation that Markus is a devilishly wiry troublemaker. She jokes about the bull’s pizzle, the painful homemade switch kept at the shop, rather than allowing Tante’s account to define the boy. The distinction matters: although the instrument was used as punishment in the household, Fidelis had never used it on Markus. In this scene, Delphine’s refusal to accept Tante’s framing protects both Markus’s immediate safety and his claim to innocence.

Refuge and Recognition

Markus has arrived in his best clothes, which are now all he owns: the store-bought shirt he wore to the funeral, short brown pants he dislikes, wool socks without holes, and Franz Waldvogel’s formal hand-me-down shoes, still too large but carefully shined. Delphine notices his inadequate clothing and arranges for Cyprian Lazarre to buy him overalls in town. Care begins in these concrete adjustments as well as in shelter and food.

She feeds him pancakes made with the last of the sweet wild saskatoons, topped with butter and a little maple syrup that Cyprian had traded for with a Chippewa. Markus eats while Delphine talks, and she does not demand an explanation for his flight. He had been too exhausted the previous night to answer questions; now she tells him plainly that he can stay until his father comes back. His eyes widen and he nods in relief.

Delphine gives Markus the choice to explain why he left, and offers to let him talk to her or to Cyprian. She draws one boundary around that confidence: he should not tell her father, Roy Watzka, because Roy blabs. Then she asks the more personal question of why Markus came to her. He pauses over his food, his fork and knife held ready, and answers, “You took care of her.” The reference is to Eva, whose eyes Delphine recognizes in Markus’s face. His reason is not convenience alone: he trusts Delphine because of the care she gave his mother.

A New Household

After revealing his reason, Markus reddens and returns to eating. Delphine wonders whether his words mean that her love for Eva will extend to Eva’s son, or whether he is asking her to love and defend him in the same way. She does not force him to clarify. Instead, she watches him eat and makes another batch of pancakes when he finishes the first, answering the vulnerable declaration with practical care.

Markus stays with Delphine and Roy, helping mow the yard, grub young trees, and clear wild morning glories from a patch Roy hopes to make into pasture. He joins Roy’s checker games and quickly learns his cribbage strategies. His presence is no longer merely a hiding place between Tante’s house and Fidelis’s return; it becomes part of ordinary household work and play.

As he settles in, Markus’s anxieties expose the responsibilities he has left behind. He worries that Franz may not be changing the chinchillas’ water as Eva instructed, that the twins might harass the animals and damage their coats, and that Tante will not know how to mix their food. These concerns show how closely he remains attached to Eva’s routines and to the creatures she entrusted to the family. The refuge Delphine offers relieves his immediate danger without erasing his worry for the home he left.

Significance

The event changes Markus’s position from a beaten child who has run from Tante to a member of Delphine’s household, protected by an adult who refuses to expose him. Delphine’s protection is neither a grand declaration nor a demand for disclosure: it takes the form of a closed doorway, a steady lie, clean clothes arranged through Cyprian, and food placed before a hungry boy. Markus, in turn, identifies the basis of his trust in a single sentence, linking Delphine’s care for Eva to his belief that she will care for him.

The episode also gives the family’s ties a chosen dimension. Markus’s appeal is grounded in Delphine’s relationship with his dead mother, while Delphine accepts him without first requiring him to justify his departure. His later participation in the household, together with his continuing concern for the chinchillas and the twins, makes clear that refuge does not require him to sever his former attachments. For the moment, care means holding both things at once: keeping Markus safe with Delphine and allowing him to worry about those he left behind.