“Friedrich Tilling.”
I still keep this letter. How frayed and discoloured the sheet looks now! It is not only the twenty-five years that have elapsed which have caused this decay, but also the tears and kisses with which I covered the beloved writing: “In deadly sorrow”. Yes, but “shouting for joy” was what I felt also when I read it. Though there was no word of love in it, yet no letter could give plainer proof that the writer loved the recipient, and no one else. That at such a moment, at the deathbed of his mother, he longed to pour out his grief into the heart, not of the princess, but into mine, must surely stifle every jealous doubt.
I sent on the same day a funeral wreath of a hundred large white camelias, with a single half-blown red rose in it. Would he understand that the pale scentless flowers belonged to the departed as a symbol of mourning, and the little rose—to himself?
CHAPTER V.
Conrad Althaus’s suit to Lilly.—The Easter foot-washing.—I meet Tilling again and receive him at my own house.—A disappointing interview.—Tilling announces his departure from Vienna.—A conversation about war.—I invite him to a last interview, which is interrupted by my father.—A ride in the Prater.—We understand each other at last.
THREE weeks had passed.
Conrad Althaus had proposed for my sister Lilly, and met with a refusal. But he did not take the matter much to heart, and remained a zealous visitor at our house, and hovered about us in the drawing-rooms of our society. I expressed to him once my admiration for his unshaken fidelity to his slavery.
“I am very glad,” I said, “that you are not angry; but it is a proof to me that your feeling for Lilly was not so ardent after all as you pretend, for rejected love is wont to be angry and resentful.”
“You are mistaken, my respected Mrs. Cousin; I love Lilly to distraction. At first I believed that my heart belonged to you, but you held yourself so aloof and were so cold that I stifled my budding passion in good time; and then for a time I was interested in Rosa; but at last I fixed my affection on Lilly, and to this affection I will now remain true to the end of my life.”
“Oh, that is very like you!”