"A word with you, Doctor! How goes it at Odensburg--in the Manor-house, I mean?"
Hagenbach had responded very coolly to his greeting, and answered with reserve:
"As you would expect in a house of mourning, where death entered so suddenly and shockingly--you have heard, I suppose, how the young gentleman died?"
"Yes, I know about it," said Egbert in a voice that betrayed suppressed emotion. "How did his father bear it?"
"Worse than he would have one believe. And yet his is an iron nature that manfully resists every assault made upon it, and he has not much time to devote to his grief either. Affairs in and around Odensburg claim his attention more than ever. You will understand how this is better than I, Herr Runeck!"
The doctor's thrust, however, seemed to glance aside from the apparently thick panoply of Egbert's composure, as he calmly went on questioning:
"And Maia? She loved her brother very dearly."
"Why, Miss Maia, you know, is hardly seventeen yet. At that age one weeps freely and is then consoled. On the contrary, Mrs. Dernburg suffers more acutely under her loss than I could have supposed possible."
"The young widow?" asked Egbert in a low tone.
"Yes; those first days she abandoned herself so to grief, that I entertained serious apprehensions, and even now she is broken-hearted as it were. I would not have attributed to her such exquisite sensibility."