Molly (who had been telegraphed to) was at the Gare to meet her friend, and managed to smother her surprise over the sudden turn of events with complete success.
“Let the maid take the boxes to the hotel,” she said, after having greeted the traveller, “and you and I will just have a nice drive before dinner, and a good long nap right afterwards.”
Rosina submitted to be led passively to a cab, and the strength of her resolution was such that before they reached the spot where Huss was burnt, Molly was in possession of the last detail as to the preceding evening. She said never a word in reply, being much engaged in looking out of the side of the cab to see if she could see the monument, an action which struck her unhappy friend as heartless in the extreme. When they drew up beside the iron fence, both got out and peered between the bars at the huge ivy-covered boulder within the enclosure.
“Was he burned on this stone?” Molly called to the cabman in German; “now why does he laugh, do you suppose?” she asked in English of Rosina.
“Oh,” the latter replied wearily, “you used the word for ‘fried,’ instead of the word ‘burned,’ but it doesn’t matter,” she added with a heavy sigh.
“I wonder whether he was looking towards the woods or towards the town when they lighted him!” Molly pursued with real interest.
Rosina felt that such talk was horribly frivolous, her own tale of woe considered, and made no reply; so they went back to the cab, and then Molly clasped her hands in her lap and became serious.
“I would forget all about him, if I was you,” she said; “you will never get any satisfaction out of a man who is always going in for jealous rages like that.”
Rosina felt with a shock that Molly was of a nature more intensely unsympathetic than any which she had hitherto encountered. She looked at the Rhine, wondered if it flowed past Leipsic, and wished that she had kept to her original determination and said nothing at all about any of it.
“I’m glad that I did as I did,” she said, with an effort to speak in a tone of indifference (the effort was a marked failure). “I’m sure that I want to forget him badly enough,” she added, and swallowed a choke.