She sat with clasped hands gazing into the flame of the candle. The little watering-place in the Thüringian forest, so long her home, rose vividly in her memory. There stood the vine-wreathed cottage of the resident physician, where Ludwig would dwell as his father's successor; the garden, with its dwarf fruit-trees, vegetable patch, and flower-beds; the hawthorn arbour by the hedge, with the vista of the chestnut avenue, along which the guests at the baths used to saunter; the little stream with its grassy banks; and, enclosing all, the wooded heights, a fitting frame for the lovely peaceful picture.
"But it would be no life for me," Johanna said to herself. "Why not? Why cannot I be content with what has satisfied thousands? Why am I possessed by this desire for—I know not what—for giving shape and expression to something? Is it not vanity, or ambition, or self-conceit?"
She was more than ever conscious of the loneliness in which she had lived since the death of her foster-mother, who had been her refuge in all doubt and distress, while her husband, Uncle Werner, as Johanna called him, had ministered only to the physical ailments of his family. She had found but little sympathy from Mathilde, Ludwig's sister, whose nature was cold and narrow; even Ludwig, sensitive as he was, had not understood her. But her father,—he must have known such times of doubt and uncertainty,—he might help her.
"I will pluck up courage and tell him everything to-morrow," she said to herself. Then, calmed and quieted by this resolve, she betook herself to bed and to sleep.
CHAPTER III.
A CRISIS.
Johanna could not carry her resolve into execution. The following morning she was busy until late in replacing by order the disarray produced by the birthday fête, and when her father, who had gone out meanwhile, returned, he hurried past her with so gloomy an expression that she did not venture to follow him to his room.
At dinner she learned the cause of his troubled mood. He had quarrelled with the manager because the latter would persist in giving various of Helena's youthful parts to her rival, Fräulein Kronberg.
"Of course I cannot withdraw my stipulations," Roderich added, "and therefore cannot renew my contract, favourable as its conditions were for me."