Kitty was inspecting it all with silent satisfaction. The dark mahogany furniture suited the faded leather hangings admirably. Against the wall, not far from the large white glazed antique stove, stood a sofa covered with chintz, and above it hung the portrait of the late dean in his canonicals,—valuable, perhaps, as a likeness, but scarcely as a work of art. The plants at each of the high, broad windows decorated the room charmingly; there were various kinds of azaleas and palms, and magnificent india-rubber trees, just now tinged with gold by the sunshine that came broadly in through the net curtains. Gold-fish in a glass bowl, and a canary in a cage,—those favourites with lonely women,—were here also; and spring flowers, gay hyacinths, with here and there a white narcissus bending its fair head dreamily, were upon the window-sills, while the work-table was fairly embowered in laurel.
"They are of my own growing: almost from the seed," the old lady said, as she noticed the girl's admiring gaze. "Of course I put the finest in the doctor's room." She opened the door of the adjoining apartment and invited Kitty to enter.
"Of course!" There was a charm in her way of speaking these words, as if they sprang from a maternal devotion which must excuse any over-indulgence. "Of course" she had given him the pleasantest room in the house,—the corner room,—below the eastern windows of which the stream rippled past. On the other side of the water lay one of the finest parts of the park, and in the distance, behind the lindens, the blue tiles of the roof of the villa could be seen. Between these windows stood the writing-table, so that when the doctor raised his eyes from his work he could see the flag-staff of the villa pointing towards heaven,—-towards heaven! Kitty suddenly felt her cheeks flush with shame as she thought how the tenderest care was watching over the man's comfort here, while there her faithless sister was employed day and night in devising some way to thrust him from his heaven. She had resigned all claim upon him with those frivolous words, "Make him happy yourself."
Did the warm-hearted, delicate-minded woman standing beside her dream, or perhaps instinctively feel, that the heaviest sorrow he could have to endure was hanging over her darling's future? She had received Kitty not as a new-comer, a stranger to the family relations, but as Bruck's youngest sister-in-law, who must of necessity be so well aware of everything connected with him that there was no need of any mention that she was his aunt. Surely she could not have known much of the inmates of Villa Baumgarten; and she confirmed Kitty's suspicion on this head by pointing to the wall over the writing-table, and saying, "All is not quite ready here; there I shall hang the photographs of his Flora, and of his mother, my dear sister."
Nothing else was wanting in the cosy room. The doctor, who was to return by the evening train, had no suspicion that his aunt had left the city. She had wished to spare him all the annoyance of moving; and the councillor had been so kind, she said, as to come to her assistance, by putting her in immediate possession of the house.
As she talked, the dean's widow went on putting a finishing touch here and there, gliding about with a step so noiseless that it could not have disturbed the doctor if he had been seated at his writing-table, deep in his new work, for the completion of which he had desired this retirement in the country.
She now opened a cupboard in the wall beside the bookshelves, and took thence a plate filled with delicate little cakes. These she offered to the young girl with a charming air of hospitality. "They are fresh; I made them to-day, busy as I was. The doctor always has a supply for his little patients, who often need a bribe. But I cannot offer you any wine, for the few bottles that we own I left in town, where they are required for the sick."
Kitty thought of the papers in her safe, "working day and night" to fill it with gold, of the well-furnished wine-cellar in the tower, and of her wayward, cigarette-smoking sister, buried amid the crimson cushions of the lounge. What a contrast it was to this simple content and self-denial! And how all this reminded her of her Dresden home! Her heart warmed to the dean's widow, and she told her of her dear foster-mother, of her wise and gentle ways of influencing those around her, and of her never-failing industry,—an industry to which she had trained her foster-child.
"But what does the Frau President say to such a system of education?" the aunt asked, with a smile, as her eyes dwelt with pleasure upon the blooming young creature.
"I do not know," Kitty replied, with a shrug and a saucy glance; "but I suppose my movements are too quick for her, my voice too loud, and I am too robust,—not sufficiently pale. Heaven knows, I am a trial indeed! Is that your sister's portrait?" she suddenly broke off to ask, pointing to an oil sketch of a very pretty woman, leaning in its frame against the wall.