K. learns that Frieda has left him with Jeremias

K. learns that Frieda has left him with Jeremias, one of his former assistants, after returning from his visit to Barnabas's family. The revelation comes from Jeremias himself, who intercepts K. outside the Barnabas house and delivers the news with a mixture of weariness and triumph, claiming that Frieda has chosen him over K. and that she will return to her old job at the Castle Inn. This event marks a decisive rupture in K.'s personal life, stripping him of the one stable relationship he had built in the village and leaving him isolated, exhausted, and stripped of the fragile foothold he had gained since his arrival.

The Encounter with Jeremias

As K. leaves the Barnabas house through the garden of the neighboring property, he sees a figure pacing in the road outside. At first he mistakes the man for one of his assistants, but when he calls out, the figure approaches and reveals himself to be Jeremias, though he looks markedly different from before. Jeremias is older, wearier, his face fuller but more lined, and he walks slowly with a limp, a pernickety and sickly air replacing the jaunty, galvanized bearing he had as an assistant. When K. asks where Artur is, Jeremias explains that Artur has left K.'s service and gone back to the castle to complain of K.'s harsh treatment, while Jeremias himself stayed behind. He claims that their behavior—the jokes, the laughter, the teasing of Frieda—was done on orders from Galater, who had deputized for Klamm and told them to cheer K. up because he took everything too hard. Jeremias complains bitterly that K. was rough with them, leaving them freezing outside the fence, almost striking Artur dead with a blow to the mattress, and hunting Jeremias through the snow in the afternoon.

The Announcement of Frieda's Departure

Jeremias then reveals the true purpose of his presence: he has come to set Frieda's mind at rest. When K. left her for Barnabas's sisters, Frieda was very unhappy, not so much because of her loss as because of K.'s betrayal, though she had seen it coming long ago and had suffered severely. Jeremias went to the school window, saw Frieda sitting on a school bench crying, and went in to her. They came to an agreement: Jeremias will become a room-service waiter at the Castle Inn until his business at the castle is cleared up, and Frieda will return to work behind the bar. Jeremias declares that there was no sense in Frieda marrying K., that K. did not appreciate the sacrifice she was making for him. He adds that Frieda still wonders whether she has done K. wrong, but that he, Jeremias, went to find out once and for all where K. was, and found him with the Barnabas sisters, who were doing just as K. wanted like puppets on a string, especially the brunette, whom he calls a real wildcat.

K.'s Response and Attempt at Reconciliation

K. tries to counter Jeremias's account, breaking the willow switch he had intended for the assistant and speaking in a conciliatory tone, suggesting that if they had not been master and servant they might have gotten on well. But Jeremias is unmoved, saying that as long as he was K.'s servant, K. was important to him only because of the job, but now K. is a matter of indifference. K. threatens that the procedure for terminating their service is not yet complete, and that he may still intervene through his connections, but Jeremias dismisses the threats. K. then argues that Frieda had asked him to free her from the lascivious assistants, and that he had simply failed to finish the task. Jeremias retorts that Frieda is a good, clever girl, a former lover of Klamm's, and that if she begged him to free her from K., why should he not do her the favor? The confrontation is interrupted by the arrival of Barnabas, who brings news that Erlanger wants to see K. at once. Jeremias immediately sets off at a run toward the Castle Inn, and K. chases after him, taking his arm and insisting they go together.

Consequences and Significance

Frieda's departure leaves K. reeling. He had relied on her as his only prop and stay in the village, and now she has been taken from him by a man he considers a pitiful specimen, one who sometimes seems not properly alive. The loss is not merely personal; it undermines the fragile position K. had constructed for himself. Frieda had been the source of his connection to Klamm, his home at the school, and his hope of becoming a member of the community. Without her, he is once again a stranger, adrift and exhausted. The event also reveals the extent to which the assistants were acting under orders from the castle, and how K.'s own harsh treatment of them may have been a tactical error. Jeremias's account of Galater's instructions—to cheer K. up because he takes everything too hard—suggests that the castle's interest in K. is not purely hostile, but that K.'s own rigidity and suspicion have prevented him from recognizing potential allies. The rupture with Frieda thus deepens K.'s isolation and sets the stage for his subsequent encounters with Erlanger and Bürgel, where his exhaustion and despair will shape his responses to the castle's ambiguous overtures.