Stories by English Authors: Germany (Selected by Scribners)

It was about four in the afternoon when a young girl came into the salon of the little hotel at C—— in Switzerland, and drew her chair up to the fire.
“You are soaked through,” said an elderly lady, who was herself trying to get roasted. “You ought to lose no time in changing your clothes.”
“I have not anything to change,” said the young girl, laughing. “Oh, I shall soon be dry!”
“Have you lost all your luggage?” asked the lady, sympathetically.
“No,” said the young girl; “I had none to lose.” And she smiled a little mischievously, as though she knew by instinct that her companion’s sympathy would at once degenerate into suspicion!
“I don’t mean to say that I have not a knapsack,” she added, considerately. “I have walked a long distance—in fact, from Z——.”
“And where did you leave your companions?” asked the lady, with a touch of forgiveness in her voice.
“I am without companions, just as I am without luggage,” laughed the girl.
And then she opened the piano, and struck a few notes. There was something caressing in the way in which she touched the keys; whoever she was, she knew how to make sweet music; sad music, too, full of that undefinable longing, like the holding out of one’s arms to one’s friends in the hopeless distance.
The lady bending over the fire looked up at the little girl, and forgot that she had brought neither friends nor luggage with her. She hesitated for one moment, and then she took the childish face between her hands and kissed it.
“Thank you, dear, for your music,” she said, gently.
“The piano is terribly out of tune,” said the little girl, suddenly; and she ran out of the room, and came back carrying her knapsack.