"Flora!" Henriette interrupted her.
"Be quiet! I speak in your interest now," Flora continued, dismissing her remonstrance with a decided wave of her hand. "Perhaps, Kitty, you think Moritz ought to display a more passionate affection for you. My dear child, he is a middle-aged man, who has long outlived a school-girl's romantic idea of love. It is, besides, a question whether you will ever be loved for yourself alone,—that must always be a question in the case of such an heiress. I cannot understand you. Hitherto you have devoted yourself to the care of an invalid, as any confirmed old maid might have done, because—well, apparently because no one desired you to do so; and now, when Henriette makes her future existence dependent upon your remaining here, you wish to go. For my part, I should be far more content in L—— if I knew that you had our sister in charge; and as for Bruck, you have just had a proof, poor child, of how little there is of sympathy between you,—he prefers to have that spoiled boy Job Brandau beneath his roof, to your constant presence there; but, nevertheless, I am sure that, since he is obliged to leave his patient here, he would like to know that she has some one with her whom she really loves."
Henriette, pale as ashes, leaned against the wall, incapable of speech, so great was her distress at Flora's ruthless and heartless enumeration of everything that could humiliate and wound her sister's heart. Kitty, however, had entirely recovered her self-possession.
"We two will discuss this alone, Henriette," she said, calmly; but the lips with which she touched the invalid's brow quivered, and the fingers that clasped Henriette's thin hand were cold as ice. "Go to your room now, I pray you;" she looked at her watch; "it is time for you to take your drops. I will come back shortly."
She left the room without looking again at Flora.
"Conceited as ever! I verily believe she is offended at being thought no beauty, and thinks that such men as Bruck should follow in her train," the beautiful woman said, ironically. Then, while Henriette silently gathered up and carried away her gift and the jewel-casket, she passed on, humming a gay air, to the room whither the two gentlemen had withdrawn, and, tapping lightly at the door, called to them that it was very impolite to leave the heroine of the day alone for so long a time.
[CHAPTER XX.]
For a long while Kitty wandered aimlessly in the park, through its quiet leafy alleys to its most secret recesses. She did not wish, in her present agitated state, to meet the observant eyes of the dean's widow; she knew the old lady would question her, and if she confessed the cause of her distress she would probably learn that her old friend also desired her marriage with the councillor. Upon this point every one was against her, Flora, Henriette, the doctor. Egotism ruled each and all of them, she now comprehended. But she would not be imprisoned in the gilded cage; she would escape them all. Her thoughts were full of bitterness as she paused, wearily, before the ruin, which she had reached in her walk. The sun was low in the heavens; its declining rays bathed in purple and gold the clouds, the dark forest of firs in the distance, and the encircling water on either side of the hill. The mound, crowned with the tower, stood out from the glittering background like a monument of black marble, and the group of chestnuts in full leaf showed like a many-pointed silhouette, through which gleamed here and there the glow of colour in the western sky.
The young girl gazed moodily at the picture across the water. There, where the heavy silken curtains fell like a dark crimson blood-stain behind the huge panes of glass, stood the detested safe. Hitherto she had feared it, but to-day she hated those four iron walls that had thrust her own individuality aside to stand in the stead of a girl filled with youthful hopes and desires and a profound longing for the true happiness of life. When lovers sued for her hand, their tender glances were for the monster that dogged her steps; they wooed the heiress in her. This was the attraction for Councillor von Römer; the wealthy man wished to be still wealthier. Certainly no worm gnawing at the core of a delicious fruit could be more pernicious than this ever-recurring torturing thought which Flora had wantonly cast into the virgin soil of her sister's mind.
And below, at the foot of the tower, yawned the dark cave where the rich man's costly wines seethed and sparkled in flasks and casks. Only lately the councillor had taken the Frau President and his three sisters-in-law through the cellar. He had just increased the precious stock, and it was all ranged carefully in the huge vaults that burrowed deep into the hill on all sides of the tower.