"Oh, Tante—so happy, so very happy; more than I can say."
"Is it so?" Madame von Marwitz lifted her head and stroked back the girl's hair. "Is it so indeed? He loves you very much, Karen?"
"Oh, yes, Tante."
"It is a great love? selfless? passionate? It is a love worthy of my child?"
"Yes, indeed." A slight austerity was now apparent in Karen's tone. Silence fell between them for a moment, and then, stroking again the golden head, Madame von Marwitz continued, with great tenderness; "It is well. It is what I have prayed for—for my child. And let me not cast one shadow, even of memory, upon your happiness. Yet ah—ah Karen—if you could have let me share in the sunshine a little. If you could have remembered how dark was my way, how lonely. That my child should have married without me. It hurts. It hurts—"
She did not wish to cast a shadow, yet she was weeping, the silent, undisfigured weeping that Karen knew so well, showing only in the slow welling of tears from darkened eyes.
"Oh, Tante," Karen now leaned her head to her guardian's shoulder, "I did not dream you would mind so much. It was so difficult to know what to do."
"Have I shown myself so indifferent to you in the past, my Karen, that you should have thought I would not mind?"
"I do not mean that, Tante. I thought that you would feel that it was what it was best for me to do. I had given my word. All the plans were made."
"You had given your word? Would he not have let you put me before your word? For once? For that one time in all our lives?"