After dinner, in the drawing-room, Otto came to Magelone just as she was going to join Aunt Thekla and her cousins around the fire. "Not there," he entreated; "come to the piano; it is so long since I heard you play."
"Lost pains," was her laughing reply, as she followed him to the other end of the room. "You never will convince me that you care for music. Did you ever really know what I was playing?"
"And if I did not, it was your fault. How can I think of aught else but your beauty, which has so bewitched me, you enchanting siren?"
"Ah, you're wrong. Sirens enchant chiefly by their song," she rejoined in a teasing tone, as she sat down at the piano and struck a few chords. "Well, Sir Enthusiast for music, what will you have?"
"Play anything; never mind what."
"Last autumn you had a passion for Chopin,—have you forgotten? Do you no longer recognize your favourite?"
She began to play. Otto sat beside her and turned over the leaves of her music when she signed to him to do so. As often as he leaned forward she felt, with a thrill, his breath upon her neck, and sometimes he whispered, so low as to be almost inaudible, a word or two in jest in which there seemed a tone of suppressed passion.
"Does he conduct himself thus towards Johanna?" she asked herself. "Impossible!" her vanity made reply, and the berceuse which she was playing assumed the character of a triumphal march.
The moods of the group around the fire were less harmonious. The Freiherr had retired immediately after dinner; the brothers Wildenhayn and Johann Leopold, engaged in a political discussion, had withdrawn to such a distance that they could not overhear the ladies' conversation, and Hildegard soothed her injured feelings by animadverting upon Johanna's position in the family.
It was certainly a matter of course that grandpapa should take charge of the destitute orphan, since in a certain sense she was one of the family; but was there any need to treat her as an equal? It was not only an insult to the other members of the family, it was an injury to Johanna herself. It would end in her forgetting her true position; she would learn to form expectations which could not be fulfilled hereafter, and she would lose by her arrogance the regard of the relatives upon whom, after grandpapa's death, she must needs be dependent.