Easter was at hand. For several weeks improvements had been going on in the garden of the house by the river. The doctor had sent a gardener from L——, who laid out new paths, or rather tried to restore the pretty old garden to its original plan. Many men were busy digging and planting, and places were arranged for some statues which had arrived from L—— and were still unpacked in the hall. The shutters of the house had been thrown open for two weeks; the rooms had been freshly painted and papered, and a flag-pole had been erected upon the roof. Then the Frau Dean's friend moved out from town, bringing with her a host of charwomen, who made the house a shining mirror of neatness and cleanliness from garret to cellar.
Kitty had not discontinued her walks. On the very day before Easter she came hither once more, at noon. The men were still at work in the garden, but the evergreens that had overgrown the land belonging to the house, forming here and there an impenetrable thicket, had been thinned and left only within the boundaries first assigned them, while from among their dark foliage gleamed the new statues. The winding paths were freshly gravelled, the old creaking wooden gate had been replaced by one of wrought iron; the Frau Dean's arbour had been freshly painted, and behind the house a high picket-fence enclosed a new poultry-yard.
Upon the familiar stone pedestal before the door stood a Terpsichore with arms gracefully extended, just as Kitty had imagined her from the remains of the little marble foot.
"The statue is very pretty," the strange gardener said to her with a shrug, "but it ought to be more elegantly placed. This lawn," and he looked around upon the old bleaching-ground, "is quite wild, by no means in proper order, but the Herr Professor strictly forbade my touching it." Kitty stooped with crimson cheeks and plucked the first violet, winch had opened fully in all its fragrance at the base of the pedestal. "Yes, the grass is full of weeds," the man said over his shoulder, as he walked on.
And the house, now really a little castle, actually shone with freshness and beauty—"fitted up as if for a bride," the Frau Dean's old friend remarked to Kitty with an unsuspecting smile. The snow-white kitten came softly to the door over the new tiles of the hall. In the Frau Dean's sitting-room, behind the crocheted curtains, in the midst of the laurels and large-leaved plants that had been moved out from town, the canary-bird piped his clear shrill song. The former life was beginning here anew, and the Frau Dean herself was to arrive by the afternoon train. She was to bring a guest with her, her old friend had remarked with a mysterious twinkle of the eye; who it was she did not know, but she had been commissioned to provide the guest-chamber with new furniture. And as she spoke she threw open the folding-doors leading into it from the hall, and tears filled Kitty's eyes as she thought of Henriette, who had lain here in such pain, and yet peaceful and happy as never before in her sad life. But even while her thoughts were thus occupied she was conscious of a sharp, unfamiliar pang of jealousy. Who was this guest who had become so dear to the Frau Dean's heart that she had been invited to stay with her?
The gay rose-covered curtains and the hanging-baskets filled their old places, but the rickety furniture had made way for what was new and pretty, although very simple, and instead of the faded illustrations of Vosz's "Luise" some fine landscapes hung upon the freshly-papered walls. The well-remembered room had been converted into a pretty sitting-room, and an adjoining cabinet that had formerly stood empty had been arranged for a sleeping-apartment.
All this Kitty looked at once more, with tear-dimmed eyes, and then walked home to place herself at her desk and answer several business letters. Lenz was to return in the evening from a business trip he had undertaken, and his young mistress was anxious to have all in readiness to be entrusted to his hands while she spent the next fortnight with her foster-parents in Dresden.
Ah, how difficult it was to fix her attention! Her pulses throbbed, and the handwriting, usually so clear and firm, looked scrawled and careless. She was interrupted too by the Frau President's maid, who came with a large empty market-basket on her arm, on her way to make her Easter purchases of provisions, and the Frau President had told her, since it was only a little out of her road, to stop at the mill and give Fräulein Kitty Fräulein Flora's letter to read. It had just come.
Susy was immediately instructed to fill the basket with all sorts of delicacies from her pantry, but the letter lay untouched upon Fräulein Kitty's writing-table long after the maid had returned to her mistress.
The Frau President had several times previously sent the young girl her step-sister's letters. The sheets had seemed to burn beneath her touch, but she had dutifully read them through that she might not seem ill-natured. And now a flickering flame seemed creeping towards her from the perfumed envelope lying near her elbow. Impatiently she moved her arm and pushed it beneath a pile of bill-headings. She could not see why, to-day, she should give herself the pain that the reading of these letters always caused her, made up as they were of frivolity, arrogance, and conceit.