"Did you really?"
"Didn't you know?"
"I am certain he didn't tell me anything about it."
"We stood chatting with one another in the street for a quarter of an hour, perhaps. I had just returned then from my first concert tour."
"Not a word did he tell me—not a single word!"
She spoke almost angrily, as though her father had, at that time, neglected something that might have shaped her future life differently.
"But why didn't you come to see us in those days?" she continued. "How did it happen at all that you had already suddenly ceased to visit us some considerable time before my father's death?"
"Suddenly?—Gradually!"
He looked at her a long time; and now his eyes glided down over her whole body, so that she mechanically drew in her feet under her dress, and pressed her arms against her body, as though to defend herself.
"Well, how did it happen that you came to get married?"