The old lady shook her head so that the gray curls beneath her lace cap trembled.
"My dear child, you ought not to speak so," she said, in a tone of gentle reproof; "you are going to marry him——"
"Because I choose to, or because I must?" Magelone interposed, going across the room to her great-aunt. "But never mind that; when we are married it will be better,—then I will not stay any longer in Dönninghausen."
"You will not leave your old grandfather alone!" said Aunt Thekla.
"I am nothing to grandpapa," Magelone answered, with a shrug of her shoulders; "and as for any entertainment that he gets from Johann Leopold——But don't be troubled about that; who knows what the new cousin may turn out? I am very curious. From all that I hear, she will be far too solemn for me,—all the better adapted, however, for our croaking household and for Dönninghausen."
With these words Magelone hurried to the other end of the room, seated herself at the grand piano, and began to play a polka; then suddenly ceasing, she ran back again to her aunt and sat down opposite her. "Can you possibly understand, Aunt Thekla," she asked, "why grandpapa has sent for this Johanna? Do not misunderstand me. I have no objection to her coming. We can yawn together, even if she is good for nothing else. But why grandpapa, who cannot endure the sound of her family name, did not rather board her somewhere——"
"I asked myself the same question," her aunt replied; "and the only answer I can find to it, knowing him as I do, is that he yearns to see his Agnes's child. Believe me, dear, he is not so hard-hearted as he chooses to appear."
"But he banished his daughter!" Magelone exclaimed.
"He did what he thought was his duty, and no one knew how he suffered in doing so," the old lady rejoined. "Agnes was his darling. How enraptured he was when, after his three boys,—the youngest, your father, was eleven years old,—a daughter was born to him! Although he was thought a strict father, he could deny his Agnes nothing. Everybody in the house did as she pleased, and did it gladly, for she was a gentle, tender-hearted creature. But she grew too dreamy and imaginative in this solitude, and when my sister-in-law at last had her way and sent her for a year to boarding-school, where she had companions of her own age, it was too late. At her very first entrance into society she fell in love with that man, that actor, and there was no help for it."
"How inconceivable it is, this falling so desperately in love!" said Magelone.