“How so?”
“Why, in going security for that old Irishman, Dalton. It is to pay this debt that he has been sold out to-day, and I fancy that Swiss cottages and barking poodles will realize a very small dividend.”
“Oh, Hanserl!” said Nelly, “what do I hear?”
“Hush, Fräulein!” said he, with a gesture to enforce silence. “I will tell you of these things hereafter.”
And now the others passed, and were soon out of hearing.
“Oh, Hanserl!” cried Nelly, bitterly, “how misfortunes crowd upon me! It was but a moment back I was feeding my mind with the sad consolation that my griefs were all my own,—that the gloom of my dreary fortune cast no shadow on another; and now I see that I was wrong. You must pay the dear penalty of having befriended us!—the fruits of all your hard years of industry!”
“And you would rob me of their best reward,—the glorious sense of a generous action?” broke in Hans. “They were years of toil and privation, and they might have been years of pleasure if avarice and greed had grown upon me; but I could not become a miser.”
“The home you had made your own, lost to you forever!” sighed Nelly.
“It was no longer a home when you left it.”
“The well-won provision for old age, Hanserl.”