"And she is right, in a certain sense, Flora," the councillor ventured to interpose.
"You may think as you choose upon that point, Moritz," the young lady rejoined, coldly; "but I must earnestly entreat you not to make my task more difficult by your interference. I am used, as I said just now, to judge for myself in what concerns me, and I shall do so in this case. And you may be perfectly easy,—you and grandmamma. I excessively dislike any sudden and harsh measure, and I have a noiseless ally,—time."
She took the goblet from the writing-table and moistened her pale lips with a few drops of its contents, while the Frau President, without further remonstrance, prepared to leave the room.
"Apropos, Moritz," she said, with her hand upon the knob of the door, "what is to be done with Kitty now?"
"We must leave it to the will to decide all that," he replied, drawing a long breath of relief. "I have no idea how the castle miller has arranged matters. Kitty is his natural heir, but it is doubtful whether he has left all his property to her; he always resented the fact that her birth cost his daughter her life. In any case she must come here for a while."
"Do not trouble yourself about that; she will not come; she is tied as securely to-day to the apron-string of her detestable old governess as she was during papa's lifetime," said Flora. "That is easy to see from her letters."
"Well, perhaps it is better that she should stay where she is," the Frau President remarked, with a shade of eagerness. "To be candid, I have no great desire to shelter her beneath my wing and waste my time in schooling her; it is very tiresome. I never really liked her; not because she was the child of my daughter's successor,—that I have always declared,—but she was altogether too much at home in the mill, getting her clothes and hair covered with meal; and then she was a self-willed little thing."
"A genuine 'child of the people,' and yet—papa's darling," Flora added, with a bitter smile.
"Apparently, my dear, because she was his youngest child," said the Frau President, who never permitted a suspicion, either in herself or in others, that any one belonging to her could be slighted. "You were just as much his darling at one time. Well, Moritz, are you coming?"
He hastily complied. As they left the room, Flora rang for her maid. "I wish to retire to my dressing-room to write; take my writing-materials and these papers there for me," she ordered. "Of course I can see no one this evening."