Accustomed to speak extempore, she had made no written digest of her address; but now she felt that in these quite altered circumstances her inspiration might desert her, and she resolved to write a draft. She looked at the clock: it was still early, only seven. No matter, she must have time to write. She rang for her maid, made a hurried morning toilette, and had her writing-apparatus, together with her breakfast, brought out on the balcony.
It was a wonderfully fresh morning, full of bird songs and spicy fragrance. Franka’s room looked out on a small group of firs, and she regarded it as a real blessing that here nothing was to be seen of the everlasting roses, and no breath of the everlasting perfume of roses. Just that day the whole rose-scheme for the time being seemed distasteful to her, for it was responsible for her making her appearance as a member of the Rose Order and perhaps lamentably failing....
She drew in long breaths of the forest-air and a half-yearning, half-regretful thought stole over her: “Why am I not in my quiet Moravian hunting-castle, which lies so deep hidden in the fir forest?” How beautiful it would be there, how restful, how lonely ... loneliness? No, that was not, after all, what she was pining for ... some one must be with her ... who? Victor Adolph? No, he was a stranger. It must be some trusty friend, some one on whose heart—a heart containing no depths hidden from her—she might lean; at the same time, some one to whom she would be the dearest object on earth.... The image of her father rose in her soul.... “Oh, yes, thou, thou! But thou art dead.”
She drew a deep sigh and went into her room to fetch out the precious notebook. She would hold a little colloquy with her father. She came back to the balcony with the book in her hand, sat down at the table where her tablet and pencil were ready for her, and instead of writing, she began to turn the pages of the notebook and to read. The first sentence that attracted her attention was:—
“The absent grow daily more and more distant!” (Japanese proverb.)
Franka looked up to the sky. “Ah, yes, my poor departed father! Death is an eternal absence—how sadly true that is. I love thee still—I see thee, but how far, how far away!”
She read on:—
Saüme nicht dich zu erdreisten,
Wenn die Menge zaudernd schweift;
Alles kann der Edle leisten,